Team:US AFRL CarrollHS/Human Practices
Outreach
As a team, we presented at many of our school events such as schedule pick up day, various club days, and parent-teacher conferences. We had a poster station and actively passed out flyers at these events to spread the word about our team. These events are an effective way to reach an audience that is interested in the work we are doing. These flyers are also a way to raise interest in next year's team so that we can continue the team in future years. We also reach parents this way, and we get to address many of their with the superstitions of genetically modified organisms. These types of open-ended conversation give the public a better understanding of the benefits of using our engineered microbe and synthetic biology in general.
First year member Chris Guptil talking to a student at our high school about Synthetic Biology!
Advanced BioFuels USA
Along with educating students at our high school and local grade schools, we also made an effort to educate the public as a whole about synthetic biology and iGEM. Thanks to Advanced Biofuels USA, we were able to do this by publishing an article on their website. Additionally, we made a music video about synthetic biology and iGEM to further raise public awareness of synthetic biology. We posted this on our social media, and Advanced Biofuels USA also linked to the video on their website.
You can also watch the video on our home page.
Starting a new iGEM team
Virginia Tech contacted our team about trying to start a team of their own. We discussed what iGEM is, how to create a successful team, the difficulties we faced as a first year team, and how we overcame those issues last year. We also talked about Virginia Tech's reasons for starting an iGEM team, one of them being that their science department emphasizes the team aspect of science in their courses, making iGEM a natural fit for their school. Finally, we told them about our current project and our project from last year, and explained how working on those projects in the context of iGEM affected their final outcome.
Input from Industry
Over the summer, the team traveled and spoke with various companies and experts who work with biofuels. One such person is Scott Fenwick, who is the technical director of the National Biodiesel Board. He expressed concerns about having more microbiology in the fuel, and he gave us many big picture ideas about how he believed that the contamination of tanks would be eliminated within about ten years. In light of this concern, we decided to try to use our microbe to prevent biofilms from forming to keep concentrations both of the organisms in the fuel and of our engineered microbe as low as possible. This proposal did allay some of his fears, but he still emphasized his earlier points about adding more microbiology, and he said he would feel better about adding our microbe if there was some control over the growth of the engineered microbe.
The team also visited Beckett, a Cleveland based company that manufactures combustion burners. We spoke with them about how the push for biofuel is causing a number of problems because the current infrastructure is designed to accommodate traditional fuels, not biofuel. Because of this, many pipes, tanks, or other parts that come into contact with fuel will experience a loss in longevity or function when used with biofuels. Changing this infrastructure is one of the hurdles that would have to be overcome to implement biofuels. One of Beckett's main issues was the contamination of B20 or 20% biodiesel that accelerated the aging of many components they use in their burners. Our team discussed our solution with a Beckett representative, and also asked questions concerning what Beckett or any other company would want to see in a solution to biofuel contamination. Within our project, we spoke about trying to prevent microbial growth early on instead of trying to kill the mix of bacteria and fungi that make up the biofilm.
Finally, the team traveled to a refining plant owned by Marathon, a national petroleum manufacturer, in Cincinnati, Ohio to speak about biofuels. The company in recent years has had an interest starting to manufacture biofuels. The team talked to a chemical engineer on site at Marathon about some of the problems the biofuel industry is facing with contamination. Interestingly, the staff at the plant conveyed that all of the contamination that was happening occurred during the transportation and storage of the fuel. This made us consider when our microbe should be implemented, and, after talking to the refining plant staff, we realized our engineered microbe would not need to be added before the refining process.
The team visiting Beckett and learning about biofuel related problems in the industry
The team visiting the Cincinnati Refining Division, a subsidiary of Marathon that produces biofuels!
The team members and their mentor Chia discuss biofuels with the Beckett representative
An experiment run by Beckett showing contamination of biofuels
Team members Max and Hayley talking to Scott Fenwick, the technical director of the National Biodiesel Board, during a conference call
Air Force Research Laboratory
We also discussed our project with Dr. Naik, a chief scientist at the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL), who provided us with feedback on our project and valuable background information. Dr. Wendy Goodson from AFRL was also able to supply us with isolates of fungi and bacteria from actual biofuel fuel tanks, which allowed us to design our microbe to target specifically the organisms found in fuel tanks. For example, we were able to use Psuedomonas aeruginosa as a target for our detect mechanism since we knew it was found in fuel tanks, and we were able to test our destroy mechanism on one of the fungal isolates, Yarrowia lipolytica. Additionally, Dr. Goodson also supplied us with a number of pictures of biofilms, fuel tanks, and pipes, along with a scanning electron microscope image of a biofilm, all of which helped us envision the problem and develop our solution.
The team and mentors with Dr. Naik (first row, far left) after presenting our project!
(From the left) Team members Annie, Max, Jonah, and Yazmin with Dr. Wendy Goodson (middle)!
Meeting with Mike Turner
We were able to reach out and contact Mike Turner, the U.S. Representative for Ohio's 10th congressional district and has served that position since 2003. We were very fortunate to be able to talk to Mike Turner about our project and discuss possible legislature idea based on our research and completed project. Throughout our research, we were surprised to see how little legislature was in place and how slow the change to biofuel was because of various factors such as fouling. One of our goals established at the beginning of the project was to talk to local and state legislature in order to display our work and bring awareness to biofuels. The schedule of the day is shown below.
An agenda for our planned meeting with Mike Turner
During the meeting, we hope to give a brief presentation of our project We plan to ask him questions regarding if he knew of the current problems with biofuels, and of Ohio's or the nation's storage of biofuels. Another main question we had in mind was to ask him whether he would be willing to help create jobs in Ohio based on synthetic biology research. Check back after the Jamboree for our results and pictures!