Future Plan

In the future, our project can be improved in these four areas:

1. Recycle, Reuse

To move beyond the boundaries of pollution treatment and better promote green industry, we need to seek ways to turn pollution into useful resources. In the scope of our project, we need to develop our ideas for recovering nickel ions, and build a working recycling system.

2. More Convenient

In this year's project, engineered yeast was immobilized for application in the treatment of effluent. For our experiments, we created our gel balls with syringes, which is relatively inefficient. In order to improve the immobilization speed, we will use a peristaltic pump in the future.

3. Safer

In this project, we introduced the kanamycin gene into the yeast genome to perform homologous recombination. In order to reduce the adverse effects of antibiotic genes carried by recombinant yeast on the environment during the application process, in the future we will remove the antibiotic genes from the chromosomes after gene recombination.

4. Wider Application

This year we focused on nickel ions, but the reality is that the effluent discharged by automobile factory or electronics factory often contain a variety of heavy metals, such as cadmium, nickel, mercury, zinc, etcetera. In order to obtain a more comprehensive effect and remove more kinds of heavy metals, we will test recombinant yeast to see if it can absorb other heavy metal ions. We will seek ways to expand the range of metals it can absorb, and increase its efficiency as well.