From 2007.igem.org

Headline text

Ideas so far

Bold textUranium bioremediation/ biosensor Chirs F mentioned the need for a uranium biosensor earlier today. I had a look into this and discovered an article on a new sensitive uranium biosensor was published earlier this year, PNAS: A catalytic beacon sensor for uranium with parts-per-trillion sensitivity and millionfold selectivity, 104(7), p2056 (2007), which rules out the need for a biological uranium biosensor. However before this discovery, we had the idea of engineering a synthetic receptor (due to the lack of specific heavy metal binding proteins present in literature), based on the success one group had in altering the binding site of calmodulin to bind metals other than calcium. Environmental chemistry (2005) p133-143

Another idea was the decontamination of toxic waste produced by nuclear power plants, to reduce the storage volume required for toxic waste. There appears to be several groups researching this area at the moment, and several have published articles on the conversion of uranium and other heavy metals to insoluble metal phosphates or reduced states, which can easily be separated out.

A third idea was to remove uranium and other heavy metal contamination from soils surrounding nuclear power plants, industry and areas where nuclear weapons/ depleted uranium have been in use. This would involve engineering plants to uptake uranium from the soil, then being harvested and safely disposed - have not yet looked into this idea in much detail as we weren't sure of the feasiblity of working with plants,