TIMELINE
AN OVERVIEW OF OUR PROJECT'S JOURNEY
AN OVERVIEW OF OUR PROJECT'S JOURNEY
Our iGEM interest team meeting essentially introduced our team’s goals and the competition to the rest of our community. We encouraged people from our school and others in our area to join the team in order to collaborate to solve real-world problems!
This was when we adminstered the tryout tests to all those interested in iGEM.
We presented our project at the KY-INBRE conference (a conference with different Kentucky institutions to connect and discuss our projects), which showed our approach to research in the development of a better method for PFAS detection and some preliminary results. The discussion after our presentation garnered great interest among those present and quite valuable advice. We made new contacts with active researchers and professionals in the fields of environmental science and synthetic biology. These newly formed contacts possess great potential for collaboration and mentorship that will be of great worth for our project ahead.
Our meeting with the Henderson County Student-Led PFAS Research Team was very insightful in the way that it provided an overview of how rural communities cope with PFAS contamination. Students shared their experiences on testing of soil samples and their efforts for local awareness raising. Their grassroots efforts highlighted difficult scenarios for rural areas, including more limited resources to do extensive testing and remediation, but also how community-driven initiatives may make a difference. This meeting inspired us to consider how our project might better support rural communities taking on PFAS contamination.
In the interview with James Marshall, he gave an overview of the current methodology for detecting PFAS from the EPA. Most methods involve LC-MS, which can be very expensive and time-consuming, hence not making them widely available, especially in rural areas. According to Marshall, there is an urgent need for faster, more affordable detection technologies that can reliably provide on-site results. This perspective increased the importance of our project because we want to develop a more efficient and accessible PFAS detection method to close this gap in research.
We began prepping our lab for our procedures in the following week! This was led by Vishwaa K. and Sheila T.
We did our wet lab work! To view more about what we did, please visit our “Experiments” and “Notebook” pages. To view our results, head over to our “Results” page.
In our meeting with Dr. Bryan Berger and Madison Mann, we discussed their work on the hlFABP-GFP construct and its potential application in detecting PFAS. They provided valuable insights into the construct’s ability to fluoresce in the presence of PFAS, offering a promising foundation to develop a faster, more accessible detection system. They also shared advice on optimizing our design and improving its sensitivity. Their expertise helped refine our project’s direction, giving us new ideas on how to integrate GFP-based detection into a practical, field-applicable solution for monitoring.
In our interview with Nima Kulkarni, the growing concern of PFAS contamination was discussed in-depth, particularly how PFAS impacts vulnerable communities, like undocumented immigrants, on a disproportionate level. She informed us that many of them live in areas where PFAS exposure from contaminated water or soil is higher, and yet they often face barriers in access to health care or legal recourse toward these environmental health risks. She argued for a better justice policy in environmental matters, so that everyone had rights to clean water and protection from hazardous substances, like PFAS. Her insights really helped us connect the dots between immigrants' rights and the environment, further informing us in our approach to help support both legal and scientific solutions to PFAS contamination.
In the meeting with the IEA team, we received background information about their project in the design of an enzyme to degrade PFAS using protein language models, specifically through dehalogenases from an acetomicrobial strain. Currently, they are collecting training data and determining structurally similar amino acids using FoldSeq, then confirming via sending enzymes to a professor at MIT to see if PFOA remains in the binding pocket. Team: The team structure includes departments such as human practices, computational, experiment, and wiki handling. Major grouping in contacting scientific experts and community stakeholders is under the human practices efforts.
In our conversation with Eric Zhu, we looked at efforts by the Louisville Water Company related to PFAS contamination happening now. PFAS is different because of the persistence it has within the environment, and how hard it is to completely take out conventional water treatment processes. He gave us a better understanding of how local utilities address this issue and motivated us to think about larger community involvement strategies in our own project.