Team:Penn/CdTolerance

In order to appropriately determine the effectiveness of using AMB-1 as a viable bioremediation alternative to E.Coli, we performed tests to measure the natural tolerance of both strands to the pollutant cadmium. The experiment allowed us to identify the threshold concentration of normal growth of bacteria. We used the tests to ensure that the AMB-1 strain could withstand the levels of cadmium present in the environment currently.

The difference in absorbance between the various types of media available was also tested to determine if a trendline needed to be generated for each media type. These differences were determined to be negligible. The absorbance data is provided in the supplementary information.

From the data, we can conclude that Magnetospirillum magneticum AMB-1 maintains normal growth under 10 uM concentration of cadmium and showed no growth in media with above 100 uM of cadmium ions. E.Coli showed unaffected growth in media with less than 500uM of cadmium ions and showed zero growth with 5000uM of cadmium ions. Although E. coli seemed to be inherently more tolerant towards cadmium than AMB-1, the data does show that AMB-1 can tolerate cadmium concentrations usually toxic to ecosystems. This shows that the strain could potentially still be a viable bioremediation tool.