DKU_CHINA

Heavy metal pollution poses a major threat to human health nowadays. Their wide distribution in the environment has led to prolonged impacts on human health, and high concentrations can also appear in various circumstances, such as industrial production, mining, etc. These features amount to a “time bomb” for public health, ready to explode anytime and pose severe threats to the safety of the public. However, conventional heavy metal testing methods all have their current problems such as low cost-efficacy, low efficiency, non-environmentally-friendly, etc.

We, Team DKU_China, aim to tackle this challenge by propelling the development of a rising new method for pollution detection: synthetic biological whole-cell biosensors. Our project is focused on the detection of copper in water to set an example and facilitate future research on the detection of other heavy metals.

To achieve our goal, we created a biosensor improved using high-throughput technologies, compared to traditional methods. We hope our efforts can help whole-cell biosensors become more widely accepted and applied in heavy metal detection.

We also took a series of other actions to ensure that our project could develop more swiftly in the future, such as standardized hardware, communicative efforts, etc. We envision a future where a whole new and enhanced generation of tools made with synthetic biology will be available for pollution detection, and a world cleaner and greener than ever…