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Team:Gaston Day School
From 2012.igem.org
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Gaston Day School’s iGEM project for 2011 has two distinct but complementary parts. First, we plan to build a functional nitrate detector using RFP. Red Fluorescent Protein has one distinct advantage over the more traditional Green Fluorescent Protein; it is visible without any special equipment. Our goal is to have a detector that is easy for anyone to use in the field. Most people, including farmers and ranchers, who would need to detect nitrogen pollution will not have a pocket UV light! We envision a kit that could be used to determine if the runoff of a particular farm was high in nitrogen. The kit will include all necessary components for running the test and then decontaminating the resulting growth to prevent release of the engineered bacteria into the environment. The second part of our project involves a close look at the actual risks of accidental release of the engineered bacteria into the environment. Many groups, including ours, have proposed and built environmental detectors of various sorts. Often, these detectors come with sophisticated mechanisms for preventing the release or for preventing the bacteria from growing if released. We would like to include a very simple mechanism for killing or denaturing the bacteria in our detector kit – bleach. Bleach is highly effective at killing bacteria and is readily available to the average person. Even if we include the bleach in the kit, we realize that many people do not (or will not) read and follow directions. We plan to simulate a variety of conditions under which our detector could be introduced into the environment, ranging from simply dumping it in the sink to pouring it into the local creek or soil. By producing survivorship curves, we can estimate the real risk of spreading the recombinant bacteria into the environment.
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Despite improvements in water quality, contaminants still interfere with farming in many of the world’s biomes. In 2012, the Gaston Day School iGEM team’s project is to help solve this problem by using the existing registry of parts to create new heavy metal detectors. We have shifted our project from last year’s nitrate detector in order to focus on cadmium, arsenic, and lead contaminants in water. These sensors are built by using multiple promoters to narrow the range of the detected heavy metals down to one or two contaminants and combined with GFP reporters to create the new part. GFP is used because our spectrophotometer can accurately measure it. Once the parts are created, they are tested for accuracy and sensitivity. Many farmers need a way to measure the amount of heavy metals in water to determine whether the levels are dangerous, therefore each heavy metal detector must be as sensitive as the respective federal limits in water. As the project continues, we plan to test the safety of the engineered bacteria and create survivorship curves as they are released into different environments, similar to last year’s testing. When the final kit is constructed we plan to include the heavy metal detectors and all components necessary to run, accurately measure, and safely dispose of the tests. This kit will help agricultural and environmental fields make improvements in safety.
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