Overview

    Organophosphorus pesticides (OP), which are highly toxic, are still used in some developing countries. Many terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems across the world are contaminated with OP. Residues of OP in food are also often reported

    This year, our goal is to construct a system that can sensing and degrade organophosphorus pesticides.

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Our Project

  • OP Degradation

        The bacterial organophosphorus hydrolase enzyme hydrolyzes and detoxifies a broad range of toxic organophosphate pesticides. In the first part, we need to use these enzymes to degrade parathion into PNP.

  • PNP Sensor

        The second part is a biosensor of the hydrolysis product P-Nitrophenol (PNP). There is no operon that can react to parathion. We foucus on constructing a PNP sensor, which can reflect the existence of parathion.

  • PNP Degradation

        We also design a PNP degradation system. We use enzymes NphA1 and NphA2 to degrade PNP, but fail. We find another pathway to degrade PNP in 5 steps with 4 enzymes in Rhodococcus sp. Strain PN1.

  • Suicide System

        With the public increasingly concerned about biosafety, we conceived a suicide gene circuit to ensure these recombinanational bacteria can only survive in laboratories and not cause horizontal gene transfer.