Michigan Science Center

Human Practices

Bioreactors as a safe measurement device and educational tool

MSU-iGEM 2017 drew inspiration for our project from the Flint Michigan water crisis. Fresh water contamination continues to impact wildlife and humans throughout the globe with contaminants ranging from oil to heavy metals and pesticides/pharmaceuticals. Contaminants such as lead are regulated by the EPA but pesticides, heavy metals, and pharmaceuticals go unregulated. We wanted to emphasize detecting contaminants that are not regulated in hopes of developing a system that can even be incorporated into water treatment facilities. We visited the East Lansing Water Treatment Plant to gather information on how to apply our project. We continued to develop the impact of our project by participating in an event with the Society of Women Engineers through their 4-H outreach. We wanted to show high schoolers the possibilities of synthetic biology and test to see if microbial fuel cells could be used as a teaching tool. Finally, we sent our bioreactors to the Purdue University iGEM team to test reproducibility of our results. We also wanted to test if our system could be used based on a detailed protocol posted on University of Michigan Software’s website ProtoCat.