How would our project be used in practical applications?

In the future, we could imagine our bacteria inside of a semipermeable membrane in a river or water treatment plant with contaminated water flowing through. The high metal concentration would activate the system and our bacteria would start harvesting the pollutants. It could be coupled to a biosensor and then, when a Cadmium concentration threshold is reached the bacteria could change colour, from white to red. This colour change would indicate that it is time for “harvesting”.

When this colour change is elicited, the cells could either be lysed by a chemical process or even induced to do it by a kill switch and the metal could then recovered and sold for commercial gain making decontaminating water profitable!

A diagram of our proposed semi-permeable membrane apparatus

In the future, we wish to investigate chelating other metals that are also found in waste water that have greater monetary value. Vanadium for example, could be chelated in a similar process to our system outlined above and sold on.