Stony Brook Meetup
Our team responded to an invitation to participate in the Jamburrito symposium, sponsored by Stony Brook University’s iGEM team. At this virtual meetup, we connected with a variety of iGEM teams and learned about their projects. We presented a brief summary of our progress in one of the virtual breakout sessions. Here, we received feedback on our work from Stony Brook University alum and Synthetic Biology Fellow at Harvard Medical School, Dr. Simon d’Oelsnitz. Dr. d’Oelsnitz appreciated that our presentation included measurement data collected on our system. He encouraged us to repeat several of our experiments to verify the trends we saw in our results, and expressed interest in our work characterizing the pH-dependent behavior of fluorescent reporters. Finally, he suggested that we address some questions about the need for our solution, which might be posed by those looking at our work.
PFAS Meetup with UNC-Chapel Hill
Our team became interested in remediating perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances, also known as PFAS, after speaking to Dr. Donald Hughes, an expert in the environmental impacts of Microprocessor Fabs from the Sierra Club. PFAS are known to be “forever” chemicals that break down at incredibly slow rates. We learned from Dr. Hughes that, from a community perspective, potential release of PFAS used in chip fabrication was the biggest environmental concern. We wanted to integrate this feedback into our project. We began by investigating whether any iGEM teams were working on PFAS. We discovered that the UNC-Chapel Hill iGEM team was tackling this difficult issue with their 2024 project. We reached out to them and organized a meet up via Zoom.
During this meetup, we discussed how our HP team had discovered the concerns regarding PFAs in wastewater from semiconductor manufacturing plants and that there are no current regulations on the release of PFAS into wastewater. A bill to regulate PFAs release was proposed, but was rejected. Details about this can be found on our Civic Engagement page.
After our team described our project and shared what we had discovered about PFAS, we then heard about the UNC-Chapel Hill project, Fluoro Fighters, from team member Dominic Kubissa. This project addresses the problem of how to remove PFAS from the human body in a safe and efficient manner. The concept of their design is taking the protein albumin and genetically engineering it, so it can bind PFAS. Once bound, the PFAS-albumin conjugate could safely exit the body through the excretory system. Unfortunately, once the PFAS are removed from the body, they will just be excreted back into the water system, and the cycle of contamination continues, which is an issue their project needs to also address.
We considered how the Fluoro Fighters PFAS binding system might be used in our device to sequester PFAS from semiconductor manufacturing waste. While their recombinant albumin might be adapted to scour PFAS from manufacturing waste water, it would not destroy these long-lived chemicals. Therefore the use of a recombinant albumin, while a significant development for removing PFAS from biological tissue, would be no more effective than conventional PFAS removal systems used in water processing, including ion exchange resins, granular activated carbon, nanofiltration, and reverse osmosis (1), which must be combined with high temperature, and high oxygen incineration to destroy.
References
1. Meegoda, Jay N et al. “A Review of PFAS Destruction Technologies.” International journal of environmental research and public health vol. 19,24 16397. 7 Dec. 2022, doi:10.3390/ijerph192416397