Team:UNITN-Trento/Project

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iGEM Trento 2012 @jasonfweb

We will be cleaning to save the World. One statue at a time.

Our Project

Italy is the first country by number of UNESCO world heritage sites, counting 47. Among them, 35 are (at least in part) of architectural nature.
Italy holds more than 52k architectural or archeological heritages. The “Ministero per i beni e le attività culturali” (our ministry for cultural assets and activities) is given not much more than €1.7M/yr, about the 0.23% of the whole State budget – consider that other countries kept investing at least 3% in culture, even in this time of crisis.
Given that here roughly a fifth of it is used for maintenance, this amount of money is easily overcome by local administration investment. We think that's a shame.

With this project we aim to develop a pool of technologies to provide easy, fast and (in time) cheap, recovery and maintenance of our -and other's- heritages.

The weather, combined with air pollution, can cause the formation of an ugly black crust on marble.
It’s composed of gypsum crystals incorporating metals, bacteria and organic compounds.
Our technologies rely on engineering bacteria, enabling them to reduce the sulfur of gypsum, disrupting it and thereby removing the black crust.