Future Work

In the future, we hope to continue working with the merT, merP, CBP4, and nixA heavy metal transport genes by incorporating them upstream of the metallothionein gene GST-YMT. Once each heavy metal transport gene is combined with the metallothionein gene, we can transform the high copy bacterial plasmid into E. coli. We will then be able to conduct a series of growth assays between our engineered bacteria and E. coli in the presence of heavy metal contaminated water.

We also hope to continue working on synthesizing a reporter system. In order to detect the saturation of metallothionein sequestering cultures, we plan on using amilCP behind the nickel/cobalt activated promoter Prcn and the mercury activated promoter PmerT. It would be useful to place amilCP behind a lead activated promoter. This system should be incorporated into the BioBrick backbone and transformed into E. coli reporter cultures. These would theoretically be placed into a second hollow fiber reactor that would be connected downstream to the transporter-metallothionein hollow fiber reactor. Effluent water carrying unsequestered metal ions would induce the reporter culture to express amilCP, producing a gradient of blue. We can then test water samples with different heavy metal concentrations to correlate effluent levels against the cultures’ color gradient.