Giant Jamboree/Program/Abstracts
Abstracts
Aachen
Salt Vault- Region: Europe - Germany
- Section: Overgraduate
- Track: Environment
- Poster: Zone 2 - 158
- Presentation: Saturday - Room 302 - 2:30 pm
Decreasing fresh water availability is not only a problem for desert climate regions like North-Africa and the Middle East, but also for European countries like Germany or the Netherlands, where water pollution is mainly caused by industry. We are modifying the genome of Saccharomyces cerevisiae to increase the uptake of various ions into the cell and store these inside its vacuole. This will be achieved by upregulation of native (vacuolar) ion importers and knock-out of ion exporters. Furthermore, we are expressing heterologous genes from the plant Arabidopsis thaliana in yeast to improve vacuolar ion accumulation, thus creating a microbial dustbin. With this newly generated library of genetically engineered yeasts, we hope to offer a novel way of treating water contaminated by industrial processes and store pollutants in our intracellular reservoir, the Salt Vault. Then this concept can be employed by industries facing problems with high pollution in their process water.
