Problem
Global water shortage problem has never been more serious ever.Right now, more than one in six people globally do not have access to safe drinking water (United Nations, 2006). Furthermore, the misuse of water source such as underground water has caused serious damage to the environment.
Seawater is considered as a water source with great capacity and its desalination industry is expected to be one of the most important solutions tackling water shortage problem. However, there's still improvement needed on energy consumption and equipment requirement to make seawater desalination truly a world-wide technology.
Solution
Reverse Osmosis, the mostly-used desalination technology, uses artificial membrane to extract salt. Have you ever considered biological membrane? And biodesalination is our answer! We use cyanobacteria as our desalination organism, the light-driven chloride pump as our desalination driver, dark-sensing promoter as our desalination controller, to establish a primary biodesalination system. We managed to decrease the concentration of sodium chloride by 20% and more optimizations may generate a greater degree of reduction.
Highlight
- We managed to functionally express halorhodopsin in cyanobacteria
- We proved that our device works as a desalintor in lab condition
- We conducted research about the combination of our project with the formal desalination method
- We mapped the water shortage problem in China
The Situation
Nowadays, health problem has become rather severe in China. In 2015, there are approximately 92.4 million people of diabetes, 170 million people of hypertension and 4.3 million newly added cancer cases in China according to the Chinese Health Big Data (http://www.yx129.com/yxqy/6176.html). On average, every 30 seconds, one man dies of cardio cerebral vascular diseases here in China. What’s worse, the age of morbidity crowd displays a younger trend due to unhealthy lifestyle.
In fact, many diseases can be prevented by encouraging more people to do physical examinations to prevent or treat diseases in the first place. However, doing physical examinations is still not very convenient. In urban areas in China, as the same in many other places in the world, physical examination is quite a time-consuming event, usually taking a whole day to accomplish and a whole week to wait for the results, which bothers busy office workers in China a lot, resulting in their low participation in physical examinations. In suburbs, especially in many poverty-stricken mountain areas in the west of China, local residents are inaccessible to take physical examinations due to the crude medical conditions and the high cost of examinations.
Our thoughts
We managed to engineer Saccharomyces cerevisiae, a yeast strain with great abundance of background information and simple genetic manipulations, to make it a promising choice for individual to make early diagnosis domestically. The most exciting part of our story is that our yeast biosensor can not only serve as a chassis for an incredibly large variety of disease biomarkers but also response in a real-time manner which allows users to get their results within 10 minutes.
