Educational Material

Educating the community was a central part of our project. We collaborated with various organizations in our community, establishing connections and raising awareness about the issues we aim to address.

Our Current Contribution

The Problem

Currently, one of the biggest dangers with raising awareness for new issues is the lack of education in general. Not only do people not know what PFAS and PFOA are, depending on where you interact with the community, such as in low-income or rural areas, knowledge on environmental contamination can be minimal. Public information and the spread of education surrounding the dangers of these chemicals is much slower than their rate of contamination in our waterways, leaving millions of people in the dark about a health crisis that affects them. Our goal of developing a simple, cost-effective way to detect PFAS and PFOA in our environment would be rendered useless if the population doesn't know about these chemicals and how dangerous they are. Our solution to this problem must go beyond research and so we must find ways to educate and teach about PFAS and our environment.

How Our Educational Material Helps

Our team hosted a workshop at the Kentucky Science Center, where we invited a class of fourth graders to come in and learn about water pollution, PFAS, and how they can help fight the environmental crisis. With this class and future classes like it, our iGEM team is preparing the next generation to take action in the challenges of environmental contamination, like addressing PFAS/PFOA regulation.

Additionally, in order to create educational material that could be distributed and have an effect on people far outside of our immediate community, our team worked with NYU-Abu-Dhabi to create Milo the Monkey, a children's book that explores the dangers of PFAS in our environment and teaches some basic ways that children around the world can help protect their water supply. This opportunity not only allows us to spread awareness of PFAS, but also helps to prepare the next generation of biologists and genetic engineers to succeed with their interests in mind.

Our Future Plans

Youth-based Interaction

In the future, increasing our interaction with the youth would be useful. Right now, this includes solely schools in Louisville, however, our goal of raising awareness extends far beyond that. We want to increase our impact to a statewide level and even further. Therefore, working with schools across Kentucky and potentially in neighboring states will help us best to raise awareness. We can take our biology curriculum that was developed for Educational Justice and spread the word as we reach out to more and more schools. Since this curriculum is already tested and successful in the Louisville schools, it provides an excellent foundation for our ambitious expansion.

Lecture Series

Creating a lecture series focused on PFAS contamination and other foundational biology topics and then marketing it through platforms like YouTube or other social media can be very effective for expanding awareness and impact. Through this approach, we can leverage the accessibility and reach of digital media to have a potential international impact, allowing us to engage with a global audience far beyond the capacity of in-person school visits. By making this content freely available, shareable, and easily digestible in a segmented lecture format, we can maximize awareness and educate citizens at no cost, establishing our organization as one that leads in both environmental science education and advocacy.

Our Project

Beyond the current implications our research offers, we believe that it can pursue even greater impacts through revision and continuation of the engineering design process.

Our Project's Contribution

The Problem

While there is already a lot of research covering PFOA's links to different cancers, there have not been any confirmed specific molecular targets for PFOA in the human body. Without this identification of proteins and the pathways that PFOA disrupts, researchers are unable to develop effective treatments, establish proper safety and exposure limits, or fully understand the group's toxicity.

How Our Project Helps

We have successfully validated the binding of perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) to one of our predicted protein targets. This interaction was confirmed through a Differential Scanning Fluorimetry (DSF) assay, which demonstrated a significant, dose-dependent destabilization of the target protein upon PFOA binding. This validation provides a critical starting point for other research teams, confirming a tangible biological interaction for PFOA that warrants further investigation.

Furthermore, our work provides a robust and reliable procedure for the production, purification, and verification of thymidylate synthase (TYMS). This detailed protocol is a valuable resource for the scientific community, as it removes significant hurdles in obtaining the necessary materials for study and allows other teams to readily produce high-quality TYMS for their own research endeavors. The established protocol also ensures a level of reproducibility and standardization across different laboratories.

By using MicroScale Thermophoresis (MST), we have also quantified the binding affinity between PFOA and TYMS, determining a dissociation constant (Kd) of 217µM. Providing this quantitative data is crucial for other teams, as it offers a benchmark for future studies on the potency of this interaction and can aid in the development of more sensitive detection methods or inhibitors.

Our investigations also revealed a potential interaction between PFOA and a TYMS-GFP fusion protein A dynamic cross-correlation matrix (DCCM) plot suggests this interaction induces a 90-degree rotation of the GFP tag, mediated by the linker region. This finding is particularly significant as it establishes a strong foundation for the future development of a FRET-based biosensor.

Other researchers can now build upon this groundwork, utilizing the observed conformational change to design and optimize sensitive and specific biosensors for PFOA.

Our Future Plans

Nuclear Magnetic Resonance

Initially, we had planned to do two experiments through the use of nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR). Specifically, we wanted to complete a kinetics assay to assess how PFOA would affect the binding of an enzyme to its substrate. However, the campus Biophysics core couldn't get to our sample in time. Therefore, in the future, we want to conduct these experiments to identify how PFOA affects TYMS's kinetics and where on TYMS PFOA binds.

Additionally, if we were to see activity on the kinetics NMR, then we can develop a biosensor that would be highly effective since these kinetics would change. This is recognized as a Förster resonance energy transfer (FRET)-based biosensor due to its ability to detect the interaction of molecules or changes in their environment.

Community Engagement

We have strived to create a large community impact thus far, and in the future, we would like to grow this impact exponentially.

Our Contribution to Community Engagement

The Problem

People are often met with involuntary exposure to PFAS through their drinking water, resulting in health advisories and shifting regulatory standards. This leads to a lot of confusion amongst the general public, but more importantly, anxiety. Through a lack of community engagement to boost awareness about PFAS, this problem has been exacerbated. There is a need for more community engagement regarding environmental contamination.

How Our Community Engagement Helps

Our community engagement efforts were essential for making our project offer a lot of societal impact while addressing the real-world PFAS crisis. By engaging with the Louisville Water Company, we grounded our work in the economic and logistical challenges of current activated charcoal treatment and costly lab testing, reinforcing the urgent need for our affordable biosensor.

Furthermore, our interactions with directly impacted stakeholder groups, such as farmer Adam Nordell, highlighted the public health and financial consequences of PFAS contamination, inspiring us to design a solution specifically for vulnerable communities and small utilities that would most benefit from a low-cost, rapid screening technology.

Our Future Plans

Legislative Impact

To continue to improve our community impact, we want to gain more exposure to the legislative field by meeting with more leaders--from simple awareness sessions to high-impact advocacy opportunities--focusing on securing policy changes and dedicated resources for those who need it. Instead of just discussing the science, we need to present our research as the impactful solution it is. Our goal is to persuade these lawmakers to sponsor legislation that provides funding for pilot programs using affordable, emerging detection technologies. By consistently leading with personal stories of impact and backing our policy requests with clear data for a viable solution, we can successfully move PFAS solutions from the lab bench to the legislative floor, ensuring our work translates directly into a safer, more equitable community.

Collaboration with Local Leaders

Engaging with local leaders will offer our team the most direct pathway to achieving greater community impact with our research. Volunteering with organizations that work to fight environmental contamination will allow us to raise more awareness about our research and how we can help boost this impact. Local engagement would provide us with more of an opportunity for validation from the general public regarding what we've done and how it could best be tailored towards them. Local leaders are the most powerful in their communities; therefore, ties with them and their organizations will allow us to set a precedent for responsible innovation. This will create a public trust that ultimately would pave the way for broader adoption of science policy.