MIT

Information

Mercury contamination of drinking water is a significant problem in both developed and developing countries. Techniques to filter it out are both costly and intensive. Thus, the MIT iGEM 2007 team is engineering a biological mechanism to cost-effectively sense and remove Mercury ions from contaminated water through a two cell system. One cell will use the Mer promoter to sense the presence of Mercury ions, then activate the GFP fused downstream. The other uses a cell surface display mechanism to exhibit a Mercury capturing peptide, extracting the Mercury from the water. Both cells also display polystyrene binding peptides, and will thus be attached to a polystyrene filter. This setup would be easy to use, cheap to manufacture, and economical to distribute. It could be used from very small scales to even an entire village's drinking water supply.

BioBrick Parts

• OmpC Surface Display
• CPX Surface Display
• CPX display of a polystyrene binding peptide
• Simple System of Transcriptional Regulator, RBS, and CPX Surface Display Mechanism
• BBa_I728201: Complex System of Promoter, RBS, CPX, and terminator

Resources

• Team Notebook
• Brainstorming:
  • Metals Heavy Metals
  • Signalers
  • for Bioremediation Project Links for Bioremediation Project
  • Ideas
  • Updated Ideas
  • Final Discussion
  • Background reading

Graphics

Top Row: Forrest Liau, Aditya Kohli, Brian Cook, Alex Lue, Semmie Kim, Bernice Huang, Jess Ho. Bottom Row: Debbie Liu, Laure-Anne Ventouras, Toan Tran-Phu

People

Students

• Jessica Ho
• Bernice Huang
• Alexander Lue
• Semmie Kim
• Aditya Kohli
• Toan Tran-Phu

Email us: team [AT] igem.mit.edu

Advisors

• Anton Aboukhalil
• Robbie Barbero
• Peter Carr
• Brian Cook
• Drew Endy
• Rana Ghosh
• Hyung-Do Kim
• Tom Knight
• Eric Krauland
• Forrest Liau
• Debbie Liu
• Romie Littrell
• Venkataramanan Soundararajan
• Laure-Anne Ventouras

Email grads: grads [AT] igem.mit.edu
Email all: igem [AT] igem.mit.edu