Team:ECNUAS/Implementation

ECNUAS

Implementation

Atrazine is a powerful herbicide that is widely used for cornfields and other farms. Since it’s quite stable and difficult to degrade, it caused huge damage to the surrounding environment.

Studies show that atrazine residue has already caused several kinds of animals to occur gene mutation, especially for aquatic animals. Also, it will hurt human beings’ health if we eat food that has atrazine residue.

The main idea of our team is using of genetically encoded biosensor to detect the concentration of CYA, which is a metabolite of the herbicide Atrazine. In this biosensor system, protein atzR is first expressed, which has been previously reported as a CYA binding protein and can regulate the promoter Pprovoin5. In the presence of CYA, atzR changes the binding conformation with promoter Pprovoin5 upon binding with CYA, so as to activate the expression of downstream reporter gene green fluorescent protein(GFP). The fluorescence signal of GFP can be detected by the fluorescence detector and the concentration of CYA can be determined by signal intensity. In this system, GFP can be further replaced by other visible chromogenic proteins, so as to realize the rapid visual detection of CYA.

Following our project design, we have successfully constructed an engineered bacteria contains pUC57_mini_Pprovoin5_amilGFP + pUC57_mini_Ptat_AtzR, which is functional in detecting CYA. When reacted with CYA, the fluorescence intensity is much more stronger than control group.

Based on our experiment results, we want to implement our project according to the following plan:

We will firstly complete the design of our biosensor relying on our positive results.
Since atrazine has been used most at farms, we have determined to distribute our products to farms. We will establish a business development department aiming at connecting with the administration departments of farms, through which we hope that our products could be distributed efficiently since the administrations usually have huge power to impact our end users, farm operators.
The environment monitoring industry is also interested in purchasing atrazine detection devices, we will also identify it as our future clients. We hope to connect with the related industry associations to get our products distributed efficiently.

Safety Concerns

· Even though E. coli DH5αhas been used for research and development for quite a long time, the leakage of it from the lab may have potential impact on microorganisms.

To mitigate this issue, firstly we want to emphasize that no evidence has confirmed its risks to human beings; secondly we will make all the lab precautionary measures to protect all of our technicians from direct contact from the strain. Meanwhile, we will sterilize the culture according to relevant regulations.

Other Challenges

1) Collaboration possibility with administration department of farms; We will try to start the possible collaboration from our hometown. In detail, we will start a series of promotion activities about our team, our techniques and our potential products at community levels. After the community administration knows who we are, we will then implement our next step to connect with the related administration department of farms.

2) Connection with academic associations or industry association related to environment monitoring We will try to communicate with distinguished scholars, from the interviewees of our project, such as Dr. Yibei Xiao, Dr. Ran Yu, to win their personal support for our project. Afterward, we will collaborate with their labs and even schools to lay a foundation for our future connection with the industry association of environment monitoring.