Introduction
Building a sustainable project has been one of iGEM LZU-HS-China-E's greatest consideration. When designing each stage of the bacteria, we always remind ourselves of the purpose: to provide a highly accessible stress solution for all the people in need, especially in countries that lack mental health resources. We believe turning our innovation into a renowned business would bring us closer to a sustainable community. From these 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), our team has prioritized four of these to serve as guidelines for us to comply with SDGs:
#3 Good health and well-being
To promote the well-being of all people of all ages, we have looked at heavy metal pollution, and we have learned many stories of adverse physical and mental health effects due to metal pollutants. The world has made significant progress in infectious diseases, with reports showing significant reductions in the number of cases reported in more than 200 countries around the world. The main risk factor for infectious disease and death is a lack of safe water, sanitation, and hygiene, with sub-Saharan Africa and Central and South Asia disproportionately affected. It is worth noting that although the number of reported cases of infectious diseases is on the decline, there is still much room for improvement regarding environmental health, especially water purification.
Therefore, our team has conducted a series of studies on the remediation of wastewater pollution caused by divalent cadmium. We learned that divalent cadmium is usually difficult to discharge after entering the body, and will accumulate in the liver, kidney, and other parts, and then cause a series of damages and lesions. Because of cadmium damage renal tubules, patients with diabetes, proteinuria, and amino acid urine. In particular, the bone metabolism is blocked, resulting in osteoporosis, atrophy, and deformation of a series of symptoms, we cannot be ignored, so we used the global regulation gene and activated sludge method of a machine to remove cadmium in water, after comparison, selected Inp EC20 Groesl IRre four genes to carry out the test.
Reducing ambient air pollution could save millions of lives in the future, dramatically reducing the number of deaths and illnesses caused by hazardous chemicals and air, water, and soil pollution by 2030.
#6 Clean water
Different countries and regions in the world have been able to continuously obtain drinking water, but water pollution incidents emerge one after another. For example, heavy metal pollution has seriously damaged precious freshwater resources, and heavy metal wastewater from industry has been discharged into rivers, lakes, streams, and other sources of drinking water for human beings, causing serious harm to human health. According to the report, three percent of the world's people do not have access to reliable sources of drinking water, and one billion people still face the challenge of water shortage every day. According to our survey of government departments, most factories now use traditional water purification methods, such as physical degradation or chemical precipitation. Some factories even use more crude treatment methods for economic benefits, resulting in the presence of heavy metal sewage in the water resources discharged, causing hidden dangers to people's healthy drinking water.
Therefore, our team is committed to using biosynthetic methods to treat heavy metal ions in sewage. Unlike traditional treatment methods, our treatment method is safer, and we can achieve a safe range of heavy metal ions in the treated water. Specifically, we used the four genes Inp EC20 Groesl Irre for the experiment. Through the experiment, we successfully treated the different cadmium ions in the heavy metal sewage, so we made a model, which could realize the separation of the metal in the sewage and the pure water.
In the future, we will do more publicity work to reduce water pollution, and to promote the guarantee of drinking water resources for human beings in the future.
#9 Industrial innovation and infrastructure
Industrial innovation is critical for our society to reach the goal of sustainable development. (Bad things about hypersaline wastewater). Hypersaline wastewater is obstructing the process of sustainable industrial development, and a feasible approach needs to be adopted. In order to solve the water pollution from factories, we designed a type of Escherichia coli that possesses strong salt tolerance to observe its function in purifying wastewater that contains a large amount of Cd (II). At the same time, we considered the feasibility of the resolution and its practicability in actual application.
We visited several industry experts to overcome some barriers we encountered during designing salt-tolerated E-coli and planning its future application. Our plan is to promote the use of salt-tolerated E-coli and advertisements that evoke producers’ awareness about reducing water pollution simultaneously. Receiving various opinions from different perspectives greatly helps us build our resolution.
If we successfully promote the wide use of salt-tolerated E-coli and the relevant propaganda, we could create opportunities for factories to continually engage in production while reducing the number of pollutants they disposed of in rivers. As a result, our revolutionary innovation will encourage traditional factories to adopt our resolution and reform their method of production into a more environmental-friendly one.
#14 Life below water
The impacts of heavy metal pollution on the sustainability of biogeochemical cycles and ecological risks have attracted increasing global attention. Heavy metals have special ecotoxicological effects such as toxicity, accumulation, and refractory. All kinds of Marine life, such as crustaceans and fish, are rich in nutrients such as protein, low-saturated fatty acids, and omega-3 fatty acids. However, due to biological enrichment and amplification effects, heavy metals can endanger human health throughout the food chain. In addition, excessive intake of essential elements for life activities will also cause toxic effects on the human body. Therefore, it is important to deal with the carcinogenic and toxic cadmium emitted by factories in the ocean for the sake of the diversity of Marine life and the collective health of human beings.
That's where our Genes Inp EC20 Groesl Irre comes in. It's designed to reduce cadmium exposure by absorbing heavy metal ions and using harmless bacteria that could then become a food source for seafloor life. This is undoubtedly beneficial to the status quo of continuous pollution of the Marine environment. We believe that our technology helps to achieve this stage of the goal of protecting organisms in the water environment from heavy metal contamination by reducing the risk of contamination.