Human Practices
Our 3 year project has always centered the environmental problem of DDT pollution, and how we as a team of synthetic biologists can help relive our community of this dangerous pollutant. Over the course of 3 years our team has worked very hard on a way to solve the problem of DDT pollution, and we think our Biosensor is the solution! Our journey to make this Biosensor begins in the 2020 cycle…
2020: Seeing the problem of DDT pollution, and looking for a biosynthetic solution.
Looking for community involvement in finding a solution. With help from local school students the idea of a “bacteria that helps to eat pollution without damaging the environment” was presented. And while simply stated this idea became the foundation for a project that would span 3 years.
With the idea of a bacteria that removes DDT pollution from the environment, we set out to modify a bacteria strand to react to the presence of DDT.
Our team wanted to hear advice directly from professionals in the field and figure out if our project idea would be helpful.
Our first discussion was with Dr. Amanda Harwood at Alma College. She is an expert in aquatic toxicology and has a PhD in zoology from Southern Illinois University Carbondale. While she thought our project idea seemed promising she gave us some insight on how to edit our design to have the most promising results.
Dr. Harwood told us that while the Pine River is certainly polluted with DDT, it is also polluted with derivatives of DDT which are causing the majority of the problems now. Dr. Harwood suggested that instead of targeting a DDT degradation pathway, our original plan, to instead create a biosensor that can detect DDT and derivative pollution. This would allow for professionals to make accurate risk assessment for a polluted area and allow us to incorporate DDT derivatives.
And thus our biosensor was born!
After our talk with Dr. Harwood we excitedly began our design process for our biosensor. Dr. Harwood suggested that we reach out to local Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) workers and see if our design showed any potential. We were able to meet with three EPA representatives working on the Pine River Superfund site and its recovery. Representatives Thomas Alcamo, Dianne Russell and Theo Von Wallmenich sat down to have this conversation with us and give us insight on how to best help them with Pine River recovery.
When presented with the idea of a faster, cheaper and more effective biosensor to detect pollution in the floodplains all three representatives were very excited and enthusiastic.
“I think this would be very, very useful for the EPA.”- Theo Von Wallmenich
The 3 representatives said that if completed and effective our biosensor could act as their new form of preliminary testing, searching potential areas for DDT and derivative pollution and providing effective risk assessment of an area, allowing the EPA to focus its resources on confirmed pollution sites and tackling the highest risk sites first.
The EPA suggested that our biosensor be able to have a detection threshold of 1-5ppm (parts per million), which would qualify this area as an “acceptable risk.” The EPA representatives say that if they are able to know if a sample is above or below this threshold, it would be very helpful in resource allocation. Another idea would be to have a higher threshold such as 40-50ppm, which would initiate an emergency response if a sample fell within this range. Discussion of a test that could give qualitative results on the amount of DDT (a sum of six metabolic forms) would be beneficial in being able to distinguish between forms, though this would not be necessary for an initial screen. This improvement to our biosensor would be used starting in a downstream site on the river and moving upstream where you are likely to see increasing concentrations of the pollutant. We have integrated this feedback into our expanded designs, creating circuits that detect different thresholds or discriminate against different types of xenoestrogens.
Another way our biosensor product would improve the EPA’s current processes would be through improving the cost associated with taking samples at superfund sites for analysis. Current tests are about $80 per sample and due to fees that include labor and shipping, the total cost is $240 per sample. See our cost analysis.
2021: Developing our biosensor and changing our perspective.
After the work done the previous year our team set our sights on improving our biosensor and getting more feedback from professionals.
We started the cycle with another meeting with TriTerra, the meeting gave us some new insights and changed the direction of our project.
TriTerra recommended changing our focus, instead of making our biosesor for professionals, we should aim to make our biosensor usable for the general public.
Our goal has always been to help our community and after doing research we agreed that the best way to help our community would be to make our biosensor accessible to the public!
The reason that we have this new shift in focus is because of the lack of communication and resources that have been given to the general public. This will be the first time residents can see and learn about the severity of the DDX pollution that otherwise has been swept under the rug. Being able to generate a streamline of easy technology and science for our affected audience will be the next step in remedying this tragedy. Our community needs us and we are looking forward to providing our synthetic biology that could change our world in Alma, Michigan.
2022: Making our community-focused design.
With our new focus we aimed to finish our biosensor in a way to best benefit the community.
We started the cycle by competing in a design engineering workshop run by Michigan Colleges Alliance and the Henry Ford Foundation. Our goal from this workshop was to center our biosensor design to be accessible to the general public and learn how to make our projects community centered for the future.
The workshop taught us a lot about community centered design and gave us the opportunity and resources to get feedback from our community. Through this workshop we were able to talk to community members about our project and work with them to design our biosensor in a way that gives the community peace of mind.
We also met with TriTerra again to discuss our project and what we can do going forward. TriTerra was happy to hear our project was nearly done and they gave us some insight on what we can do next.
They recommended finding a way to expand our biosensors capabilities to detect other chemical pollutants. This idea gave us confidence that our biosensor has great potential as it is and even greater potential in the future.
Going Forward: The future of our biosensor.
We would like to finish our biosensor and make it accessible to the public, preferably patenting it and selling to a company with experience and capabilities to produce the biosensor test. This way we can be sure the public will get the test and be able to use it confidently.
Integrated Human Practices
A large part of our work this cycle was done in a design engineering workshop we participated in, run by the Michigan College Alliance (MCA) and the Henry Ford Foundation. This workshop specialized in teaching community focused designing and engineering, since we were finishing our project we wanted to enroll in this workshop to ensure our project had community based intentions and learn more about community based design for the future. For this MCA design engineering workshop we needed to focus on our community and how to best design our biosensor to benefit and supplement our community. Through this workshop we were able to have the opportunity and resources to talk to members of the Alma and St. Louis community and get their opinion and feedback on our biosensor. After meeting with members of the community many of them seemed excited and hopeful about our biosensor, however, the biggest piece of feedback we received was concern about the use of E. Coli bacteria. Many of our community members were concerned about the use of the live bacteria and worried about the bacteria escaping or contamination. We took this feedback and brought it back to our biosensor design and worked on a way to maintain our original work and meet the needs of our community. After researching we decided upon a kill switch to immediately kill the E. Coli bacteria in case of contamination. This change was widely accepted by fellow community members as a great way to solve the problem of live E. Coli use. After adding this kill switch to our design we finished the MCA workshop with the leaders of the program supportive of our work and ranking it high in terms of potential benefit in our community.
In our search to put our community first, our Human Practices team also decided to search for new perspectives on our project, entering the world of environmental ethics. Our goal was to look into the ethical issues present with DDT and see what ethical issues arise with our Biosensor. Through research on both environmental ethics and the history of DDT, Human Practices member Alice Hutchins was able to record and analyze all of the present issues in a short article.
In Alice’s words, “The DDT and Malaria Question is a paper aimed to examine the balance between health effects resulting from DDT and the health effects from Malaria. While there is mixed literature and implied health effects of DDT, there are clear, well understood and studied effects from Malaria. Some scientists think that the usage of DDT currently, with the ban in the United States and the continued risk within at risk countries. Some scientists think that there is not enough evidence against DDT to eliminate the usage of it. Finally, some believe that DDT should not be what we rely on for vector control. The conclusion of the piece is that there is no clear answer; new methods of vector control are likely to take a prolonged period of time, which will still extend the usage of DDT. The DDT and Malaria Question is the first attempt of the Alma College iGem team to examine the ethics regarding the overall idea of DDT. This ethical question was examined in a holistic approach, pushing the boundaries of the question past Alma College and into a global scale. This means that we are integrating the importance of ethics in developed nations but also within developing nations, who are typically forgotten about in this discussion.”