At its core, our project was designed with the aim of targeting real world problems with real world solutions. To gain a better understanding of the best direction to follow for our project, we conducted interviews with professionals in the fields in which we were interested. We also reached out to our community to learn about public perception of synthetic biology and fluoride in our town. Last year, the 2018 East Chapel Hill HS iGEM team learned about the effects of fluoride on the human body, as well as its impact on communities in the Ethiopian Rift Valley. This year, we aimed to further what we learned last year, and apply it both in our research and in the way we approached human practices.
Human Practices Gold
Interview with the NC Rural Center
In order to gain a better understanding of the water problems that rural communities are faced with today we interviewed the Rural Water Center NC, speaking specifically to Todd Brantley, the senior director of public affairs, and John Coggin, the director of the Rural Counts advocacy program. The NC Rural Center advocates for better funding for water in rural areas of North Carolina, and we were surprised by many of the obstacles they face in their work. They highlighted how crucial of a role politics plays in the development of rural centers, especially because many of the areas that need funding the most don’t have the technical ability or capability to apply for the funding that might be available to them. Additionally, the state legislature focuses on doing just enough to keep old systems running, while not enough funding is being put into modernizing utilities. To combat this issue, some small towns in the southeastern part of the state have begun to regionalize their water utility systems, which reduces the amount of government funding needed and diminishes consumer prices when water treatment is consolidated. However, in the long term, regionalization won’t solve anything, so the NC Rural Center pushes for a more sustainable use of funding at the state level. We also discussed our project, and they were excited to hear about efforts being made at the high school level to explore cleaner and cheaper methods of water purification and toxin detection. After this interview, we decided to pursue a detection method that would be more quantifiable and potentially cheaper. This lead us to focusing on a cell viability assay using liquid media instead of agar plates.
Water plays a pivotal role in how the world adapts to the effects of climate change. The deceleration of climate change are heavily dependent on an integrated view of water and biogeochemical cycles that contain it. Higher temperatures lead to unpredictable weather events that affect the availability of the distribution of groundwater, river flows, rainfall, etc. In areas where fluoride already affects the drinking water supply, climate change increases the vulnerability of the water supply, resulting in a cycle of contaminated fluoride that is difficult to stop.
The recent traction that the global climate movement has gained around the world inspired our team to take action. By working with the Alliance for Climate Education Fellows, we were able to hold a successful branch of the Global Climate Strike in Chapel Hill. Speakers during the march included Dr. Jason West, a professor at UNC-Chapel Hill’s Department of Environmental Sciences and Engineering. A snippet of his speech is linked above. Residents in the area expressed support in the face of the climate crisis and responded positively when told about our iGEM project.
There was a large youth population present at the strike, which was a direct effect of a majority of high schoolers planning the strike. Other speakers and activists at the strike reaffirmed that climate change was a worldwide problem. The climate movement directly affects both developing and developed nations, which is in concordance with the information we gathered from the interview with the NC Rural Water Center.
We engaged with a science-focused audience of around 12,000 listeners and informed them on our work with the fluoride riboswitch, as well as basic synthetic biology. It is run by Calvin Yeager, a doctoral graduate student at UNC, who asked us to join him for an episode as he focuses on projects that directly impact “tax-payers and human scientists”. The podcast, CurioSCity, is based in Chapel Hill (UNC) which was important as we explained our inspiration for our project, which originated from a fluoride problem in Chapel Hill. The podcast was two episodes; the first discussing the process of making an iGEM team, fundraising, and the opportunities that become available. The second episode discussed the science behind our project, our goal for it, and its potential impact. Additionally, we explained how our project has evolved as we developed it over the past 3 years. The podcast gave us insight into how iGEM is a competition that provides valuable experience for those entering research fields, but isn’t yet as available as other competitions, such as Science Olympiads, especially at the highschool level. Listen to our podcast on Spotify here!
Presentation to PLTW Biomedical Board
To increase awareness in our own community about our project and the importance of its potential implications, we created and executed a presentation for the biomedical advisory board of our school district’s biomedical advisory board. Our presentation detailed iGEM’s mission, our fluoride biosensor research, and our accomplishments from the past two years. We outlined how excess fluoride contaminates drinking water and how our long-term goal is to combat the resulting detrimental health effects through awareness, detection, and sequestration. The board provided us with advice and potential future directions, as well as ideas for other possible human practices. Along with this, we discussed the problems with fundraising for iGEM and ways to potentially make it more accessible for students. The board directed us to grants provided by the district that allowed us to provide equalizing opportunities for people who wanted to participate in our team.
Library Fundraisers
We held many fundraisers outside of our local library, the Chapel Hill Public Library. We worked to raise money for our team, so we could attend the iGEM Giant Jamboree, but also so we could raise money and awareness to help improve rural North Carolina water infrastructure systems, specifically to benefit the NC Rural Center. We would inform people on our projects and answer their questions on fluoride as they passed by or if they were donating.
