As humans progress in the river of history, we have left marks on mother earth as our proof of existence. Most of these marks in the early ages are settlements, tribes, and small villages. Starting from the industrial revolution in the 18th century to today, humans have been advancing in every field possible more rapidly than ever. Though this is a good thing for humans as we are enjoying the benefit of modern technologies, at the same time, humans have also left more marks than ever during these years. Air pollution, global warming, deficiency in non-reusable resources, and many other environmental issues have raised the attention of every country. Similar to humans’ rapid development from the 18th century to the 21st century, humans already have precautions regarding pollution on earth. However, there is one pollution that humans have yet to solve: heavy metal pollution. And heavy metal pollution is often included in water pollution, mostly due to mining, metal production, and the chemical industry. Therefore, we need to have a method to detect and isolate the heavy metals in water for the safety of the earth's ecology.
Our project is a low-cost visible detection and reporting system designed to address the high price and operational difficulties of existing assays. The final output of our assay system is a kit containing all the chemistry required for the assay steps and a strain that has been inserted with a synthetic plasmid, all in-lab. In our designed product, the operator mixes the strain, the solution to be tested and other chemical reagents and places them in the culture, and after half an hour centrifuges the supernatant for color identification. The whole operation process is fast and not very complicated.
Our products's targeted end-users are primarily smaller independent third party testing companies like Centre Testing International Group (CIT). We intend to make our product a superior alternative to the existing abiotic Testing industry. As the testing industry not only cares about the accuracy of the test results, but also attaches great importance to the cost of raw materials and artificial detection reagent and testing time, our reporting system utilizes the chromogenic reaction between the SRRz gene and X-gale to present the detecting result. Since the operon is positively correlated with the ion signal intensity of the substance, different ion intensities will lead to to different gray values of the final color.
For instance, if we sampled the water body with a copper ion-specific detection system and get a dark blue result, it meant that the water body contained a high concentration of copper ions. If it is light blue, it indicates a low concentration. Apparently, compared to abstruse and uncomprehensible numbers, gray value is a very straightforward result. Anyone who reads our instructions carefully can carry out accurate chemical detection and understand the result easily. Therefore, our products is more convenient, efficient and user-friendly than traditional detection methods.
In conclusion, while previous detectors requires highly skilled operators and expensive precision instruments, our product will be a more affordable and desirable alternative, especially for those small-scale third-party independent testing companies with limited budgets.
As our detection relies on the specific promoter of Escherichia coli, basically all the substances corresponding to the specific promoter of Escherichia coli mastered by the existing technology, such as arabinose, metal ions, or lactose, can be used as the test substance. Therefore, our detection system can be applied in many fields.
Monitering pollution level
Many environmental contaminants, such as a range of heavy metal ions, have corresponding E. coli specific promoters, which means that we can produce detectors for many different contaminants. For example, heavy metal pollution is prevailing accross the globe. To alleviate the situation, relevant departments needs preliminarily assessed the pollution level in certain region. Here, our detection system can be used.
In recent years, with the release of important governmental documents such as the national Action Plan for the Prevention and Control of Air Pollution, the Action Plan for the Prevention and Control of Water Pollution, the Action Plan for the Prevention and Control of Soil Pollution, and the Guidance on Promoting the Socialization of Environmental Monitoring Services, the Chinese government has paid an increasing attention to environmental protection, leading to higher detection frequency and demand. Consequently, more and more attention is paid to the marketization of environmental monitoring business.
Given the existing situation, it's off great significance that we first consider the relevant regulations and requirements of each country in this respect before actually entering the market. Therefore, when designing the produce, we ensure that all our testing reagents and packaging can be used and treated without causing any harm, and it should always meet the Sustainable development Goals (SDGS). By doing this, the usage of our product will not encounter safety and legal problems after being purchased by relevant enterprises.
Food production and safety
With the transformation of people's consumption concept and the continuous improvement of food safety awareness, consumers and enterprises now attaches higher significance to food safety . The frequent occurrence of food safety incidents prompts the government to introduce a series of laws and standards to increase the supervision of food safety. At the same time, enterprises are also motivated to increase the investment in testing in order to build a safe brand image in the minds of consumers. At present, our testing system can provide testing for food, drugs, daily chemical products, agricultural products, health products, feed, food packaging and contact materials.
For example, this detection system can detect the content of a substance in a food, which makes a contribution to the quality inspection of food. It can also detect the lactose content in milk, and determine whether the batch of milk meets the factory standard.
In the global market, small testing companies are not in advantaged position, as the absolute position of the old large enterprises in the market makes the emerging and developing small testing enterprises invincible in the international market. This may cause our products being blocked in the upstream of the market. But at the same time, our major challenges of producing a substance detection kit is that we have to open an assembly line for mass production. If we choose only part of the area development, we must take into consideration the cooperation with fixed local enterprises, so as to ensure the sales of our products. In addition, we also need to communicate closely with the local government to understand the local details to determine our target companies. For example, in the development of the Chinese market, most of the market is directly controlled over by the government, so cooperating with relevant departments or organizations may be an ideal option.
During the design process, the major problem we encountered is the bacteria disposal after use. More specifically, we have to ensure those bacteria that are not lysed to death are inactivated at the end of the experiment.
X-gal can cross the cell membrane and perform color reaction with the endogenous ßgalactosidase of the bacteria to produce blue color, so the color of the mixture before centrifugation can not be used as the final basis for our judgment. However, the bacteria deposited at the bottom after centrifugation did not lysate and die, so the treatment of this part of bacteria has become a problem that we need to consider. We finally decided that the experimenter could kill these bacteria by irradiation with UV lamp to help find safety, and we will add a hint for finding UV lamp for sediment in the kit instruction. In addition, since the bacteria involved in our detection system are a kind of bacteria highly mastered by modern science and technology, harmless and environmentally friendly, and the X-GAL used is non-toxic and harmless, our project can ensure that there are no safety problems.
