Milwaukee Public Health Department

Early in the development of our project, we interviewed Dr. Sanjib Bhattacharyya, laboratory director at the City of Milwaukee Health Department in order to better understand some of the difficulties with current water testing methods and the potential application of our product in the realm of Public Health.

Through this interview, we learned that the current methods for water safety testing involve overnight culture and colony counts, and in some cases Next Gen sequencing methods to analyze the composition of various water samples. While these methods are both reliable, and specific (in the case of Next Gen Sequencing), Dr. Bhattacharyya expressed that the time constraints or cost associated with these methods are significant limiting factors for the work of Public Health.

One example given was of testing the safety of various recreational water sources such as beaches. According to Dr. Bhattacharyya, part of the work of Public Health in Milwaukee is to determine whether the many beaches surrounding the city are safe for use by the public. Unfortunately, the most commonly used method in their lab (culture and colony count) takes upwards of 12 hours for a definitive answer that would allow them to shut down an unsafe water source, during which time members of the public could be exposed to dangerous pathogens.

Dr. Bhattacharrya expressed interest in a method that would allow his team to significantly cut down testing times, or provide enough information in the short term to allow a judgement call regarding a particular water source. However, he did make it clear that specificity to fecal coliform bacteria or indicator species would be vital, and that being cost effective and simple to use would be requirements if we ever wanted to provide a usable product, or bring our method to market.

This interview allowed us to view our product in a new light: What if we marketed our test to Public Health departments as a preliminary test method to make those necessary fast decisions Dr. Bhattacharyya mentioned!

MUBRC Conference

As a way to gain feedback regarding our project, we presented our initial project plan and concept at the first annual Milwaukee Undergraduate Biological Research Conference. Our involvement was not strictly limited to presenting our work as the WLC-iGEM team also played a role in organizing and facilitating the conference.

Overall, we gained valuable feedback from other collegiate researchers and their PIs, with some questions being raised about the single-use nature of our test kit, and ways we could either recycle, or reduce the waste produced by our kit. Finally, we were also encouraged to examine ways we could market or provide our test kit to at risk communities in need.