讲座题目: Eco-friendly and sustainable approaches for bioremediation of arsenics and other toxic metals for protecting human health and the environment
主讲人: Dr. Abul Mandal, Professor of Molecular Biology and Head of Physiology and Toxicology Research at the Systems Biology Research Center, School of Bioscience, University of Skövde, Sweden
主持人:翁杰敏 教授
开始时间: 2015-5-29 10:00
讲座地址: 闵行生科院534报告厅
主办单位: 天美娱乐 科技处
报告人简介：Abul Mandal is a Professor of Molecular Biology and Head of Physiology and Toxicology Research at the Systems Biology Research Center, School of Bioscience, University of Skövde, Sweden. Prof. Mandal awarded his PhD (Doctor of Philosophy) degree in 1983 in Cell Biology with specialization in Plant Genetics and Breeding from the University of Agriculture, Krakow, Poland. He was a postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Botany, University of Stockholm, Sweden from 1985 to 1987 and then he joined as Associate Professor of Plant Molecular Biology at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (SLU) in Uppsala, Sweden. Prof. Mandal's current research is focused mainly on gene tagging, identification and studies of novel genes that might be involved in arsenic uptake and accumulation in plants and/or bacteria. The fundamental goal of this research is to remove or significantly reduce arsenic contamination of water (microbial remediation) and human foods, in particular rice (phytoremediation). Until today, Prof. Mandal has supervised (as a main supervisor) eight PhDs and six Postdocs and published more than 100 articles in peer-reviewed journals. Some of the recent articles can be found here http://www.his.se/mana/. As a principal investigator he also has five patents registered in USA, EU and India. Prof. Mandal has participated in more than 60 international scientific conferences and at least in half of these as a speaker or invited speaker. Moreover, he has a 30-year pedagogic/teaching experience in higher education. So far, Prof. Mandal has been awarded research grants for more than two millions EUR as a main applicant and approximately one million EUR as a co-applicant either from the Swedish Research Councils or from the EU. In two occasions Prof. Mandal has achieved Government awards for research excellence by the Ministry of Science and Higher Education in Poland. Besides the Swedish collaborators Prof. Mandal has a well-established collaboration with researchers in Bangladesh, England, India, Indonesia, Poland and USA. At the present time Prof. Mandal is also functioning as the editor of the Journal of Biomedicine and Biotechnology.
报告摘要：More than 500 million people worldwide are exposed to arsenic poisoning on a daily basis either through drinking water or consumption of contaminated foods. Long-term consumption of arsenic contaminated water and foods has been demonstrated to impact the environment and human health severely, resulting in many cancerous diseases, neurological and vascular disorders and system-wide organ damage or failure to function. The first part of this seminar will deal with removal of arsenics from the contaminated water/effluents by using microorganisms (microbial remediation), whereas in the second part possibilities for generating a new genetically modified variety of cultivated crop such as rice to effectively reduce arsenic contents in the human foods (phytoremediation) will be presented.
The research group at the University of Skövde has recently discovered a naturally occurring bacterial strain which is highly tolerant to arsenics. When exposed to arsenics this strain also uptakes and accumulates very high amount of this metalloid inside the cells thus resulting a significant reduction of arsenic contents in the growth medium. Sequencing of the genomic DNA of this strain resulted in identification of several genes responsive to arsenics. These results suggest that this strain can be used as a potential candidate for bioremediation of arsenics from the contaminated sources. Further functional analyses of these genes are in progress.
By using bioinformatics and molecular biology tools the research group at the University of Skövde has previously identified and studied four key genes of the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana which play a central role in accumulation and metabolism of arsenics in plants. The modeling experiments showed that arsenic accumulation in the model plant can be reduced by 67%. Laboratory experiments performed with two of these key genes showed that arsenic accumulation in the green parts of the transgenic tobacco plants was reduced significantly. These results can be applied for developing new crops with eliminated or reduced accumulation of arsenics and also other plants for remediation of arsenics from the contaminated environment.
In the next step, the research group at the University of Skövde aims to produce a new genetically modified variety of rice with the help of these key genes. The new variety of rice will contribute to reduce arsenic content in foods to a safe level and thus hundreds of millions of people around the world can avoid severe diseases caused by food-based arsenic poisoning.
