Environmental pollution with heavy metals is a very serious ecological problem, which can be solved by bioremediation of metal ions by microorganisms. Yeast cells, especially Saccharomyces cerevisiae, are known to exhibit a good natural ability to remove heavy metal ions from an aqueous phase. In the present work, an attempt was made to increase the copper-binding properties of S. cerevisiae. For this purpose, new strains of S. cerevisiae were produced by construction and integration of recombinant human MT2 and GFP-hMT2 genes into yeast cells. The ySA4001 strain expressed GFP-hMT2p under the constitutive pADH1 promoter and the ySA4002 and ySA4003 strains expressed hMT2 and GFP-hMT2 under the inducible pCUP1 promoter. An additional yMNWTA01 strain was obtained by adaptation of the BY4743 wild type S. cerevisiae strain to high copper concentrations. The yMNWTA01, ySA4002, and ySA4003 strains exhibited an enhanced ability for copper ion bioremediation.
Keywords: Bioremediation; Cell adaptation; Copper ions; Human metallothionein MT2; Saccharomyces cerevisiae.