The Canadian Indigenous drinking water crisis has been an ongoing issue for decades affecting over 160,000 Indigenous Canadians. After meeting with representatives from the Queen’s Office of Indigenous Canadians and Chief R. Don Maracle from Tyendinaga, we learned that there isn’t a reliable drinking water diagnostic device for testing water pathogens. Typical testing involves a public health officer hired by the community to come from outside and collect water samples to bring back to a lab for testing. The process can take up to a week which is extremely unsettling for residents. Our goal is to help these communities detect for unwanted pathogens in their water at a point of care level such that residents can see firsthand if their water contains harmful pathogens, as well as provide a water filtration system to ensure safe consumption. To achieve this, our solution will use synthetic biology and engineering to create an easy to use yet effective water filtration and detection system.

To combat this diagnostic issue, we have chosen to use an emerging nucleic acid amplification technique called Loop Mediated Isothermal Amplification (LAMP) as the basis for detection. This amplification technique has been proven to work on an industrial level in the detection of SARS-COVID through an at home test by Lucira©. After numerous meetings with different members of Indigenous communities, we learned: 1) the most common method of water purification in these communities was through boiling and 2) many purification devices fail in these communities because they are too difficult to operate for the average user. Thus, we have decided to design a kettle-like device which would be used to heat the LAMP reaction whist simultaneously boiling the water and killing potential pathogens. Specifically, we have designed our test to target conserved 16s rRNA regions amongst four major pathogens in Canadian Drinking water: E. coil, Salmonella, Shigella and Campylobacter.

Figure 1. Conserved 16s rRNA regions amongst E. coli, Salmonella, Shigella and Campylobacter.

To optimize our LAMP reaction, we have re-engineered the polymerase responsible for LAMP via mutagenesis and protein fusion for a more thermally stable polymerase and more processive reaction. Our device consists of three attachable lids: one lid for mechanical filtration, one for LAMP and one for drinking/pouring. The user will first filter any water from their tap with the mechanical filter to get rid of any heavy metals or dirt’s in the water. This filtered water will collect in the kettle body. The user will then obtain a drop of water into a LAMP test tube and place this onto the LAMP lid. The LAMP reaction will be facilitated by the heat generated from boiling the water and be monitored by a temperature sensor. After 30 minutes, the diagnostic will be available, where a purple solution indicates no pathogens were presnt in the water whereas a sky-blue solution indicates there are pathogens in the water. In addition, the water in the kettle will be filtered and boiled, thus free of any harmful pathogens and safe for consumption.

Figure 2. General schematic on how our POC water treatment and diagnostic device will work.

In Canadian Indigenous communities, drinking water quality has been an ongoing issue for over 20 years (1). Recently reported as of November 2021, there were 99 total drinking water advisories in First nations communities across Canada, with 14 of them being in place for at least 10 years (1). Further, water-borne infections are 26 times higher in Canadian First Nations communities compared to the national average (1). With this being said, there is still no reliable diagnostic test for Indigenous Canadians and they must rely on an outsider to complete tests which generally take up to a week with the risk of skewed results.

So why is this problem important and especially important to QGEM? We believe that everyone everywhere should have the right to accessible, clean, and safe drinking water no matter the location or situation. Why we chose to combat this problem and what inspired us was the fact that this issue was happening right in our community around Kingston Ontario. We discovered that the First Nations reserve known as Tyendinaga which is only 45 minutes from our lab was suffering from contaminated drinking water and we wanted to make a difference in their community and by extension all communities suffering from contaminated drinking water in Canada.

At the beginning of the season we outlined 4 main project goals:​

• To create a rapid and reliable diagnostic water quality test for Canadian Indigenous people suffering from contaminated drinking water. ​
• To improve the LAMP test reaction by at least 1 order of magnitude, to narrow the gap between water diagnostic devices on the market and traditional LAMP sensitivity.​
• Create a working prototype of our device
• Educate and spread awareness to those both near and far about the problem at hand.​