User talk:Dbanyaib/sandbox

Heavy Metals

Toxic heavy metals pose an array of dangers for species in over 10% of the world's farmlands and can be traced back to human activity 80% of the time. One heavy metal that requires much attention is Cadmium. Cadmium is an extremely dangerous heavy metal partially due to its incredibly long half-life of over twenty years. These dangers can be felt by plants and animals alike resulting in diseases such as lung cancer, homeostatic disruption, growth inhibition, and damage to the reproductive, cardiovascular, renal, and hepatic systems.

Although the fast majority of microorganisms are sensitive to heavy metal toxicity, in the recent decades, studies have found seventy different species of bacterium which are resistant to the toxic effects of cadmium. Studies have been done in order to test the effectiveness of biosorption and bioaccumulation of cadmium when put to use in the field in order to immobilize it from biological influence. Biosorption has been found to be a favorable technique when trying to immobilize cadmium and similar heavy metals, because it is specific to the metal that one is aiming to secure. These studies have found that there are two specific biological pathways for resistance to toxic metals in microorganisms including metal-binding proteins and efflux systems. The efflux system of gram-positive bacterium is often a single protein known as the CadA protein which binds to the cadmium atom/molecule and removes it from the cell. In gram-negative bacterium, the mechanisms for ridding toxic metals like cadmium is often a network of multiple proteins which transport the toxic metals out of the cell.