Team:UT-Knoxville/Human Practices
Welcome to UTK iGEM 2018
Human Practices
The UT Knoxville 2018 iGEM team wanted to explore how efforts in bioremediation could help improve our own community and set out to learn more about disasters that had happened which our research could positively influence. We reached out to the Tennessee Valley Authority to learn more about a 2008 coal fly ash slurry spill which is estimated to cost between $550 million and $2 billion to clean up with an estimated timeline of 24 years. A major concern of this incident was the impact it could have on water systems. Our team chose to focus specifically on volatile organic compounds (VOCs).
Contamination of groundwater from VOCs is a serious human health hazard. Industrial waste that is improperly disposed of or treated is typically the source of VOC contamination in groundwater systems. VOC contamination is difficult to clean up because they are soluble in water, distributed in a heterogeneous manner, and difficult to detect at low concentrations while still being hazardous. In the Pompton Lakes area of New Jersey, an explosives manufacturing plant operated from 1886 to 1994, resulting in chlorinated groundwater contaminants. The western area of the contamination plume is low in oxygen. Under these conditions, VOCs like chloroform degrade into dichloromethane (DCM). As of 2017, three different groundwater areas in Albany, Georgia were polluted with chloroform from various industrial practices. In Lubbock, Texas, home of Texas Tech, over a dozen contaminants were found in the drinking water by the EPA. Groundwater contamination from industrial processes has a lasting effect on the environment and is a major health hazard to the individuals that rely on those water systems. Environmental regulations can help prevent these contamination incidents, but early detection and clean up requires more engineering solutions. The goal of our projects are to characterize hadases which degrade the VOC dichloroacetate (DCA) and design a biosensor capable of detecting dichloromethane (DCM) levels in water systems to further characterize the degradation pathway of DCM under anoxic conditions.
When considering the design of our project and assessing the environmental risk associated with using E. coli as a host organism for characterizing the global relevance of hadases and developing a biosensor for dichloromethane, we decided our genetically engineered organisms would only be utilized in the laboratory for diagnostic purposes. E. coli is a well characterized bacterium with a rapid growth rate that is commonly used for gene editing techniques. The E. coli used in our work is Biosafety Level 1 and non-pathogenic.
Our team set out to educate and engage the community in order to foster a positive relationship with synthetic biology. This summer, our team participated in STEAMcon, an event showcasing how science, technology, engineering, and mathematics contribute to the community in diverse ways. We also presented research to incoming students at UT’s freshmen orientation to garner interest in iGEM and promote synthetic biology. The University of Tennessee, Knoxville iGEM team embodies the volunteer spirit and values the community we live in. We are proud to share our work with the community and help educate them on the usefulness of synthetic biology and the measures we take to ensure our work is safe and working to preserve our beautiful world through bioremediation.
Integrated Human Practices
We originally intended to use this project as solely a metabolic engineering effort. However, after discussing our work with experts in the field, specifically Dr. Robert Murdoch and Dr. Frank Loeffler, we decided to also perform an exploration of dehalogenation in the environment in order to simultaneously explore a greater diversity of enzymes, as well as learn about the metabolic importance of dehalogenation in the environment. By focusing our project on a set of global haloacid dehalogenases, we are providing not only data that can effectively help us bioremediate toxic pollutants, but also provide us with basic scientific knowledge through a greater understanding of the global prevalence of dehalogenation.