Team:HiZJU-China
In China, steroid estrogens had been widely added to feed and veterinary medicine, and with the development of medicine, steroid estrogens have also played a quite significant role in the treatment of some diseases.
However, due to the difficult degradation of estrogen preparations, the discharge of estrogens during its' production and the excretion of human and livestock after the use of estrogen preparations lead to serious estrogen pollution in water system. As a kind of EDCs, the concentration of estrogen up to as tiny as 1ng/L would have a serious impact on the endocrine system of organisms.
More serious is, estrogen pollutants in water can cause potential harm to human health through bio enrichment effect, inducing precocious puberty in children, ovarian cancer and breast cancerin women , and decreased sperm quality in men.
Among steroid estrogens, EE2(ethinyl estradiol) is the most commonly estrogen additive in current drugs. EE2 is one of the two active ingredients in short-acting birth control pills, which are gaining increasing attention and popularity among Chinese young women.
Being a stubborn environmental estrogen, EE2 is very difficult to degrade naturally, and its estrogen effect is second only to E2, which is naturally formed, among commonly used estrogen preparations. EE2 will be a thorny focus in the future of estrogen contamination.
Therefore, we determined to supply synthetic biology methods to develop efficient degradation and rapid, specific detection of EE2 in the environment. The following is our design of the project.
Project Highlights
For boarder application environment and higher degradation rate, the part of the project introduce knowledge on synthetic biology and bio-chem reaction kinetics embodied in the transfer of amoA and Hao gene from Aeromonas hydrophila to E. Coli. At the same time we optimize the promoter in accordance with the Heterotrophic organisms character. Finally we attained to degrade both EE2 Homologue and nitrogen amid water and bring more prospect to Co-metabolism.
Targeting at the defect of temporary detection device like HPLC,time-consuming, cumbersome and expensive, we resort to synthetic biology and two-hybrid yeast technology and import Plasmid coupling protein and receptor into Pichia pastoris. This Recombinant Fluorescent Yeasts can show a linear correlation between Fluorescent lightness and EE2 content. Which obtain the characteristics of low cost, short duration and easy operation.
Applying bioengineering knowledge, the degradation part and the detection part are combined into a semi-automatic organization that is suitable for large-scale industrial application scenarios supported by the government to deal with estrogen pollution in a certain watershed. The one-way flow filtration mechanism is used to prevent the engineering bacteria in the culture tank, degradation tank and detection point from leaking, and batch sampling is used in the internal cycle processing to realize the integration of degradation, detection and discharge.
Contact Us
Zijingang Campus, Zhejiang University, Xihu District, Hangzhou city, Zhejiang Province, China, 310058
