Team:Washington/HP/Silver
As part of our human practices, we aimed to determine how safe, responsible, and good for the world our automated culture system will be when used in industry applications.
Usefulness
Initially, we looked for specific industries in which our Chromostat automated culture system could be applied. We believe that in the future, yeast fermentation processes would benefit the most from our system, giving those in biological manufacturing better real-time monitoring and control of metabolites of interest. These industries include drug manufacturing, high-value chemical production, perfume making, and beer brewing. We talked with the general public and experts to determine how our system might be implemented in these industries.
Listen to some of our interviews and read about how these discussions impacted the direction of our project on our Gold Human Practices page.
After these discussions, we decided that for this iGEM season, we would focus less on specific applications of our device and more on the Chromostat technology. We believe that our system’s most useful feature is that it is a closed-loop system, able to both monitor cultures and control for different metabolite levels.
This type of real-time monitoring provides a novel method for monitoring cultures. Real-time monitoring and automated control is of great interest in many fields that use yeast cultures, as they reduce labor-intensive and tedious work, increasing employee time on higher-level tasks. It also reduces risk of human error, and thus the potential need to repeat experiments or redo manufacturing runs.
It also provides new opportunities for data mining, which can generate large amounts of knowledge and lead to faster and more accurate conclusions about the effect of various metabolites on culture conditions. This data is, in most cases, currently unavailable. For brewing processes specifically, this could provide a whole new level of sophistication, allowing brewers to potentially control for molecules that affect taste, color, and nutrition.
Safety
When operating electronic devices, there are inherent risks for users not informed about proper handling. Our system integrates electrical components with liquid yeast cultures, making these risks an important consideration for our team. Please see our Safety page to read more.
As part of our open-source hardware and software, we are working on creating a user manual. Please see our Gold Human Practices page to read more.
Responsibility and Ethics
Containment of Engineered Organisms
In many synthetic biology projects, there are concerns about the impact of releasing genetically-engineered organisms into the environment, as these organisms can pose a risk of outcompeting wild type organisms, mutating, or transferring genes horizontally to naturally-occurring organisms.
Thus, it is important to consider using genetic pathways that minimize these risks. For example, many projects incorporate kill switches or orthogonal systems that are highly unlikely to be transferred to other organisms, in the case that the engineered microbes are released into the environment. These considerations are one reason that our team has chosen to work with yeast. Saccharomyces cerevisiae has a relatively stable genome and is less likely to experience horizontal gene transfer. We recommend that as our system is implemented with different yeast strains, users carefully consider whether their engineered strains are more or less competitive than wild strains and whether a kill switch or other mechanism can feasibly be integrated in order to minimize environmental risks.
Additionally, we recommend that our device be used in designated laboratory or industrial environments that are kept separate from other work and living spaces and free of clutter. In addition to decreasing safety risks, this will reduce the chance of spills and containment issues.
Automation in the Workplace
With increased automation in nearly every field, including in cell culture processes, many questions are arising regarding the impact that automation will have on current scientist and manufacturing jobs. Since current monitoring of metabolites is largely done offline and controls are adjusted manually by skilled specialists in cell culture and analytics,
With these issues in mind, we developed a set of goals for our project’s use. We believe that our system will not replace human jobs, but instead will shift those jobs from tedious management tasks to higher-level development and optimization work. If used as we intend, our technology will provide workers with more data and free up time for them to do more with this data. It will not necessarily replace sensitive tests like HPLC and or mass spectrometry for high-quality analytics, but will provide real-time control of factors that would otherwise go unmonitored.
Accessibility Through Open-Source Components
We hope our system can benefit labs and manufacturers in a wide range of fields and locations, including those with relatively few financial and supply resources. In order to facilitate this, we have made our hardware and software open-source through our GitHub.
Cost and Energy Use
We do not want cost to be a barrier to the successful implementation of our culture system, and have aimed to use low-cost, easily-accessible, and durable components. Furthermore, compared to other lab equipment that requires large amounts of electrical power, our system runs does not require more energy than a desktop computer. This also lowers the carbon footprint of our system, making it a sustainable addition to your lab.
Conclusions
After exploring the safety, responsibility, and usefulness of our device, we developed a set of constraints and criteria for our project in terms of its usage and goals.
| Constraint/Criteria | Accomplishments |
|---|---|
| Closed-Loop: System is able to read outputs and add inputs without manual culture handling. | Our system can be operated as intended with pH indicators as a culture proxy. Visit our exhibition space at the Jamboree to see it in action. |
| Additional Benefit: Instead of replacing current culture systems and analytics, the system gives new functionality in real-time monitoring and control. | Our system does not replace other lab instruments. Our next step is to test real-time monitoring and control with the violacein pathway. |
| Safe to Use: System is well thought out and self-contained, and users are informed about potential hazards. | Our system is well-built, our lab members were thoroughly trained, and we are working on a user manual to teach others about safe operation. |
| Open-Source: Make the hardware and software easily accessible to other teams and lab groups. | Visit our GitHub to learn how you can build your own Chromostat! |
| Cost Effective: Keep the material costs of the device under $1000. | We estimate that our current system cost only $500, greatly overperforming our goal. |
| Low Energy Use: In contrast to other lab instruments, system should use minimal power. | System is eco-friendly, using about the same power as a desktop computer. |
| Low Environmental Hazard: Yeast are engineered so as not to outcompete wild species if released. | Since our work is a proof-of-concept using the violacein pathway and is meant only for our lab, this was not within this year’s scope. |
