Field trip to Ganzhou

To explore our system's practice,we went to Ganzhou,Jiangxi for perfecting our project. Ganzhou is abundant in rare earth element minerals. What's more, these elements exist in mineral resources as ions.

First of all, we conducted a questionnaire survey on local residents. To find out how much they learn about lanthanid,and whether they realized the potential enviromental problems about mining activity. What's more, we aim to figure out whether people could accept biological solutions.

We did a survey about our project. Here are two representative and improtant results.

We could easily find out most people did believe there wwa pollution in mining activity, especially villagers living near the mining area. And according to the locals, due to various reasons (pollution is the main reason), all the mining work stopped and many companies were on the verge of bankruptcy. One employee from local mining company told us that their company was shut down because they failed to reach environmental standards.

Luckily, we also find that people in Ganzhou are looking for an effective and enviroment friendly way to improve current situation. What’s more, we were surprised to find out that more than 80% people could accept our project, which means there’s a possibility that our project is going to meet their needs in the future.

At last we took water samples from the mining area. From these water samples, we could further improve our project by knowing its working condition. Also, these samples enabled us to get related parameters for our modeling to simulate the real world. Besides, we also looked for more information about the mining area by turning to library.

Reference: Jin S, Huang Y, Hu Y, et al. Rare earth elements content and health risk assessment of soil and crops in typical rare earth mine area in Jiangxi Province[J]. Acta Scientiae Circumstantiae, 2014, 34(12):3084-3093.

According to the figure above, it is obvious that concentration of REE in the mining areas’ waterbody is nearly 10000 times higher than it in the non-mining areas. In addition, the pH of waterbody in mining area is lower than that in non-mining area. All of these show the numerous REE leak from the process of mining. It will cause harmful effect to the environment we live in. When REE soak in earth, it will be easy to be absorbed by crops. In mining areas, the content of REE in crops is 20 times higher than the National crop standard. Although there is a study show that appropriate concentration of REE can promote the growth of vegetations. When it reach the threshold, the yield and quality of crops can be destroyed. What is more, it may destroy the health of human through food chain.

Expert advice

0.At the beginning of our project design, we consulted the faculties College of Environment at our university. They gave us many suggestions on the feasibility and safety of microbiological methods, also gave us sample on this field, which help us figure the key problem.

1.We can find a more suitable microbial chassis instead of E.coli because it might be intolerable to so any heterologous recombinant proteins.

2.How can we recycle Tb3+ from the recycled REEBOTs? Maybe we can extract them (Tb3+) by some chemical solutions, and then purify them by replacement reaction or others.

3.We can optimize the pmrC promoter and triple LBT by modeling and doing some orthogonal experiments. Besides, we should consider how to improve the efficiency of the sitag by designing the shape of our silica board. The suggestions given by Prof. Chen brought us a way to enhance our REEBOT system, which directly advanced our project progress.

4.PH should be changed to denature LBTs to separate rare earth ions after the capture work.

5.One teacher from SCUT questioned whether our oprf-3 * LBT can express at the membrane surface successfully. She thought that the over-length of oprf-3 * LBT may not meet our own requirements, so we will verify that by modeling and doing some orthogonal experiments.