Hacking biology to improve society

ALEJANDRO NADRA

Workshop; Gathering for Open Science Hardware; 2017

Introduction  In the last decade or so, there have being significant advances towards hacking biology and designing biological machines. Advances on synthetic biology deeply rely on interdisciplinary teams and students vanishing boundaries. Many society problems have solutions in the academia  but those hardly reach the people.Our goal  is to use existing tool/resources (or create them) to applying technology towards solving Latin American problems.One  implementation:  Argentina  is  one  of  the  countries  with  more  arsenic  in  its  groundwater,  having  around  4,000,000  people  exposed  to  its unnoticed consumption. Arsenic measurement in private wells is limited by the high costs, the need of specialized personnel and the distance to urban areas. The Industrial design and synthetic biology are combined in an innovative development that uses genetically modified bacteria to detect toxic arsenic levels in drinkable water based on synthetic biology tools. It was designed to be cheap and easy to use (image based instruction will be enough). The device has a modular design which enable us to detect other of water pollutants, with minor genetic modifications.