In spite of the significant infrastructure and strict requirements for water purification and usage in the United States including potable water standards, wastewater effluent requirements, and recreational water usage standards, incidents of individuals being impacted by various forms of water contamination are reported each year. For example, high amounts of lead were found the drinking water of Flint, Michigan, just 4 years ago in 2014. In 1993, 69 people died and an estimated 400,000 people were sickened as a result of the Cryptosporidium parasite in the water in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

Regular water testing is a necessity even when adequate filtration systems and regulations are in place. In rural areas, however, it becomes much more difficult to ensure the safety of water supplies through testing and management as in many cases, individual homes are fed by wells that can be contaminated. While generally only impacting small numbers of people, contamination of well water can still be dangerous not just for those individual well users, but also for other individuals with wells that tap into the same deep aquifers. The CDC recommends that well water should be tested annually for water borne illnesses but in many areas, especially agricultural communities, Nitrates and micro-organisms are known to contaminate well water through sewage and fertilizers.

This market of small town well water users is one that is of great interest to the WLC-Milwaukee iGEM team as it would be an ideal niche in which to implement our project and target as a market for our kit. There are currently a variety of biological contaminant test-kits on the market for private consumers to use in their own homes. Unfortunately, however, these test kits are marketed as requiring 24-48 hours until a result is ready.

The 2017 WLC-iGEM Team, specifically Elise Sloey, tested a variety of these test kits on the market using blind-study methods for whether a sample contained bacterial contaminants or was a control to determine the accuracy of these kits (see …. for more information on testing methods and results analysis). The results of this testing indicated that not only do many of these test kits require a significant amount of time, many of them are quite inaccurate (data table courtesy of WLC-Milwaukee iGEM 2017).

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