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Hey, watch out!


There may be something lurking in your food…

Have you ever heard of the news where the consumer council tests random samples of food and always finds SOMETHING WRONG?

It must be concerning to hear these news, having experts tell you of threats that you may not have known.

Well, we’re sorry to say we are obligated to inform you of another.

What is this?

Heavy metals, a toxic pollutant of soil.

In fact, 14-17% of global agricultural soil is affected by metal pollution

(Hou et al., 2025).

In China alone, as much as 120 million tons of grain are being polluted annually, and an estimated economic loss of about 20 billion RMB (Zhao et al., 2024).

Of which, the worst culprit of them all, Cadmium.


Cadmium is a heavy metal used in battery making and protective coatings. It is the leading heavy metal pollutant in terms of soil pollution and can be absorbed readily by crops (Xia et al., 2024).

From our consultation with Dr Xiyue JIA, this poses a significant health concern as long-term exposure to its toxicity may cause sever liver damage.

Cadmium pollution is especially prominent near industrial and mining areas in different developing countries such as China or Thailand (Hou et al., 2025), both of which are major food exporters.

Policies and restrictions are a start, but they're not enough to protect our soil. To truly defeat cadmium pollution, we have to stop it at the source.

Our team's mission is to target the major source of cadmium pollution.

INDUSTRIAL SLUDGE

Our project engineers the bacterium P.putida to express metallothioneins that specifically bind to cadmium, providing a solution towards removing low concentrations of cadmium from sludge when conventional methods might fail to.

Check out our project description for details on the project!

Press any of the following to learn more about our iGEM journey!

Project Modeling
Experiment Human Practices Team


References


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