Team:UANL Mty-Mexico

One of the major environmental problems in northeastern Mexico is arsenic contamination of groundwater. Several projects have previously aimed to biorremediate heavy metals and metalloids using bacteria, but without scalable potential due to the lack of an efficient cell recovery system.

We aim to develop an easy-to-recover arsenic biosensor and chelator. Recovery strategy will consist of a new adhesion mechanism that enables bacteria to bind to silica surfaces through the expression of the L2 ribosomal protein, attached to the outer membrane protein AIDA-I. A quantifiable, highly-sensitive luciferase-based reporter system coupled to an oligomeric metallothionein is expected to increase our system’s capability of arsenic sensing and chelation.

We will be as well working on the construction of a new genetic switch, called the biphasic switch, which takes advantage of phage lambda's mechanism in a way never used before. We expect to be able to combine positive and negative regulation and independently control expression from two different promoters through a single input. The concept and mechanism of an integrated biphasic switch we propose could potentially double the capabilities of existing information processing genetic circuits. Finally, light will be used as input, as it is a promising non-invasive stimulus.