Team:HNU China/Project

Background

As far as the bronze age, our ancestors began to extract valuable metal from the mineral, with the combined process of chemical reaction and high temperature treatment, using quite a lot energy. When this ancient industry comes to the modern time, piles of problems emerge, then hinder the road to a more industrialized life, both more comfortable and material-consuming, some of which show as below:

1. Due to the long history of mineral exploitation, people look for high purity reserves deep underneath the surface, DANGEROUS, making it to the miners.
2. HIGH UTILIZATION RATIO is what we are appealing to the mineral waste slag as well the abandoned mines, which abound with reserves, however is not cost-effective under the treatment of traditional way.
3. Besides of the slag, metal reserves shall also exist in the CIVIL WASTE. since electronic device used and threw in our daily life. Trash leachate is another object we resort to collect the valuable metal.

Microorganism, the core of novel field microbialmetallurgy, contains several aspects of benefits distinguished from the old way. The major species selected in recent research are existed in certain natural environment with special metabolism and ion uptake systems, taking Thiobacillus species, Acidithiobacillus species as illustration. With the technique of synthetic biology, create an artificial life, based on baker’s yeast, with expected strong capacity of iron absorbing, is what other scientist never tried and what we aim to achieve.

Description

Our microbial miner briefly consists of two systems, iron sensitive absorbing system and optogenetic apoptosis system, the last of which is designed for the biosafety reason.

1. Iron sensitive absorbing system:
1. IRE: part of the upstream none-coding sequence of human ADH1 RNA, which will form a hairpin structure with human protein IREBP, inhibiting the process of translation.
2. IREBP: human protein.
3. FET3: baker’s yeast protein, plays a substaintial role in the iron uptake.
2. optogenetic apoptosis system
1. Cry2-CIB1: both of these transcription factors are cloned from the genome of Arabidopsis, which will react under the blue light, then initiate the expression of the gene downstream.
2. Casp3: human protein, plays a core role in the cellular apoptosis.

Experimentation