East Lansing Water Treatment Facility

We visited the plant in hopes of leaving with a better idea on how to tackle the current issue of contaminated water supply. Bob, the manager of the plant, took us on a full tour displaying everything he could from where the water entered to where the solids and the clean water departed. Bob spoke told us about how water treatment is expensive and that the plant is barely getting by and using 40 year old equipment and machines. Late in the tour he told us some stories from when he visited some small villages in Nigeria where the people would drink water that was clearly contaminated as they had no choice and little knowledge of the contamination. This encouraged us to pursue the idea of creating a cheap water contaminant detector.

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 even with the Society of Women Engineers. We wanted to show high schoolers the possibilities of synthetic biology and test to see if bioreactors 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.

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