Team:Chalmers-Gothenburg/Human Practices

Integrated Human Practices

Our efforts in this project would not be worth it if the final envisioned product could not be used by the people working closer to the problem. We therefore wanted our Human Practices to be integrated into every step of our iGEM process, from a starting idea to something that could be used in the industry.

Collecting Opinions from the Swedish Fishermen's Production Organization

To accomplish this we went outside the comforts of the lab and down to the Gothenburg harbor to meet up with Fredrik Lindberg, an experienced fisherman and representative of the Swedish Fishermen's Production Organization. Fredrik works daily in the fishing industry and was glad to hear that our team was working towards improving the marine environment. He contributed to our project by explaining how it would affect people who are working closer to the problem, outside of laboratories and school books. Fredrik told us that the EU regulations regarding the allowed levels of toxins are especially problematic when it comes to salmon. It was an even been a bigger problem in the past, but it does remain a problem today in the Baltic Sea, between Sweden and Finland. His primary interest was large-scale detoxification of the fish that he makes his living from.

Since we wanted a product that could actually be used in the water and soil cleaning industry, it was crucial for us to talk to as many people in related fields as possible. Thanks to their pointers and great advice we could transition from our original idea, that was good but not really suited for real-world application, to our more viable final idea.

Developing our Idea with Scientists within the Field

In the early stages of the project we envisioned a net that could be lowered into the ocean by fishermen, cleaning the water from PCB. Our PCB degrading cells would adhere to this net, live from it and remove the toxins from the water by degrading them. An illustration of this idea is displayed in Figure 1. When proposing this idea to the people in the Systems and Synthetic Biology lab at Chalmers University of Technology, they pointed out some problems with its intended application. How were we supposed to keep the cells alive? What if the flow of water was too high and the cells could not ingest the PCB molecules fast enough? And if the cells accidentally fell off the net, could we incorporate a kill-switch into them to avoid spreading genetically modified organisms in the environment?

Figure 1. Our first envisioned product, a net to which the PCB degrading yeast would adhere. The net would be lowered into the water from boats, cleaning the sea from PCBs.

Taking this input into consideration, we concluded that we would need to contain our organisms. The idea to keep the cells in a water permeable box was proposed, where the box would be placed in rivers, water treatment plants, and other relevant locations. This idea is illustrated in Figure 2. To investigate this idea further, we had an interview with Olof Bergstedt, Adjunct Professor in applied drinking water engineering in the Division of Water Environment Technology at Chalmers University of Technology, as well as an employee of the Office for Water and Circulation in Gothenburg Municipality (Kretslopp och Vatten).

Figure 2. The second envisioned product, a box where the cells would be contained. The box would be permeable for water, but not for the cells. PCB contaminated water would flow through the box, and when flowing out the water would be clean.

The topic of the conversation was how water treatment is done today, its strengths and weaknesses, and how our organism would best be implemented to contribute to this. Bergstedt concluded that the yeast would probably not fit very well in a water treatment plant since removal of chemicals is not a priority in water treatment due to the low amounts of most toxic chemicals in water. He also informed us that PCB in the Gothenburg area is most prevalent not in our waters, but in sediment. According to Bergstedt, cleaning this sediment is enormously expensive, and even though there are laws related to utilization of contaminated grounds many construction companies are allowed to ignore these because of the need for infrastructure and the cost related to decontaminating soil. Thus, sediment cleaning seemed to be an area with lots of room for improvement, in desperate need of cheap, efficient solutions.

With this in mind, the new vision for the product was based on a bioreactor where contaminated soil would be treated with a solvent that would make the soil-bound PCB available for our yeast to degrade. This new version of the project allows for containment and proliferation of the yeast as well as an easily maneuvered and adaptable system. An overview of this new product idea is shown in Figure 3.

Figure 3. The final envisioned product, a bioreactor-like construction where PCB contamined soil can be cleaned after treatment with a solvent that releases the soil-bound PCB molecules.

Gathering Feedback from Naturvårdsverket and Aqua Biota

To further discuss the practicality of the project plan we contacted Naturvårdsverket, a Swedish governmental branch responsible for environmental issues. Here we spoke with Erik Westin, who agreed that a bioreactor seemed like the best way to implement our yeast to avoid disturbing the related ecosystems. He was not deterred by the use of GMO in this process, "as long as it gets the job done". Erik verified the current high cost of removing toxins from sediment and emphasized the need for a more economically viable option.

To get a better understanding of the affected environments we interviewed Johan Näslund of Aqua Biota, a company focused on both services and research related to healthy aquatic environments. In this conversation the idea of the bioreactor was further corroborated. Näslund also pointed to the importance of the dechlorinating part of our pathway as PCBs are more stable at higher levels of chlorination, meaning that dechlorination can allow for naturally occurring degradation to happen. With this feedback we decided to model the dechlorination capabilities of the gene pcbA5 in isolation from the rest of the pathway to investigate whether this would be sufficient. The results of this modeling can be found on the Modeling page.

Further Reading

Check out the other ways in which we interacted with the community around us! In Education & Engagement we have collected all the ways in which we aimed to inspire and educate people, whereas Collaborations focuses on how we collaborated with other teams within the iGEM community. In Modeling you can read further about how the dechlorination of pcbA5 was simulated, as well as the rest of the degradation pathway.