Environmental Industry

The world today is facing unprecedented, interconnected environmental challenges in areas including air pollution and climate change, water pollution, solid waste management, deforestation, ocean acidification, and so on. As an emerging and widely studied discipline, synthetic biology can contribute to the environmental field in two ways, bioremediation and environmental monitoring. To be specific, pollutant-degrading microorganisms strain screened and domesticated from the environment, and corresponding bioremediation technologies, are widely used to remove environmental pollutants.

Bioremediation

Bioremediation is a process of detoxifying or degrading contaminants present in the soil, wastewater, or industrial sludge relies on the action of microorganisms. Bioremediation is therefore considered as a safe and sustainable technology in environmental industry.

In bioremediation, synthetic biology could be used to design enzymes with unique activities towards the following aspects, including persistent organic xenobiotics, organisms that are resistant to challenging environmental conditions, robust biopolymers, artificial storage organelles for toxic metals and more^[1]. Some examples:

Encapsulation of a polyphosphate kinase in Escherichia coli leads to the increased uptake, and compartmentalization of phosphate. This can be used for phosphate removal in pollution.
Ideonella sakaiensis 201-F6 is a most promising species mined for PET (polyethylene terephthalate)-degrading. Enzymes isolated from I. sakaiensis can convert PET to mono(2-hydroxyethyl) terephthalic acid (MHET) and then to terephthalic acid (TPA) and ethylene glycol.
Bacteria, including Xanthobacter autotrophicus, have been isolated for the application of breaking down a broad range of halogenated aliphatic compounds in solid waste.

Environmental Monitoring

Biosensors, combined sensing biomolecules (such as DNAs, aptamers, peptides, enzymes, or antibodies) with physicochemical transducers, have been developed for detection of environmental pollutants. Compared with conventional approaches, these methods have several advantages, including low cost, high speed, and the ability to perform real-time monitoring. Some examples:

Bacteria, such as Geobacter sulfurreducens and Shewanella oneidensis, have the ability to grow as highly conductive biofilms which form the basis of microbial fuel cells (MFCs) be used for the monitoring of p-nitrophenol in industrial wastewater, atrazine, formaldehyde and copper from mine effluent.
Cell-free systems, using aptamers, nucleic acids, peptides, enzymes, antibodies, or proteins as probes, can be used to sense heavy metals. On the other hand, using recombinant DNA technology, various whole-cell biosensors have been developed for detection of environmental pollutants, including heavy metal ions^[2].

The use of synthetic biology technologies in environmental industry is still in its early stages, but already offers exciting possibilities towards the use of engineered organisms to provide a cleaner and safer environment.

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References

Rylott, E. L., & Bruce, N. C. How synthetic biology can help bioremediation. Current Opinion in Chemical Biology, 2020, 58, 86-95.
Kim, H. J., Jeong, H., & Lee, S. J. Synthetic biology for microbial heavy metal biosensors. Analytical and Bioanalytical Chemistry, 2017, 410(4), 1191–1203.

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