Regulation and application of Tilapia metallothionein

• Main Authors: pengyuching, 彭雨菁
• Other Authors: Chieh-Chen Huang
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2005
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/68591619192471788977

碩士 === 國立中興大學 === 生命科學系 === 93 === The Minimata disease caused by mercury contamination during 1950s, and the Itai-itai disease caused by cadmium contamination during 1960s had made people pay more attention to the heavy metal pollution problems that may disturb the ecological environment of ocean and arise the toxic risks of human’s daily life. In the water environment, tilapia shows higher tolerance than other kinds of fishes and was known as a biological marker for heavily polluted water areas. Since metallothionein protects against the harmful effects of a wide spectrum of stress factors and one of the physiology roles is to detoxify the heavy metals through chelating, the metallothionein protein and its expressing system of tilapia may serve for developing either a biosensor system or a biosorbent system. For these purposes, we focus on the relationship between expression level of tilapia metallothionein and concentration of heavy metals in contaminated environments. And the application of tilapia metallothionein as biosorbent was also discussed. In this study, Real-time RT-PCR was used to evaluate the relationship between RNA expression level of metallothionein and concentration of heavy metals. On the other hand, a cell surface protein ompC was used to fuse with tilapia metallothionein and the fusion protein was expressed on bacterial host. The host’s abilities of both resistance and adsorption were enhanced.