Team:SJTU-BioX-Shanghai
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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
