CloudLab: Analyzing Complex Microbial Responses to Dynamic Environments

Access to clean water supplies is critical to our quality of life and our economy, yet across the country thousands of hazardous waste sites are so heavily contaminated that the underlying groundwater does not meet drinking water standards. Measuring contamination in the environment is critical to human health and to the DOE Biological and Environmental Research (BER) program’s goal to understand complex subsurface systems, but current testing is mostly limited to sporadic sample collection for laboratory analysis. Not only is this process costly, but it is inefficient, making it difficult to monitor groundwater with high spatial or temporal resolution. As a result, current methods often do not capture the full complexity of how contaminants behave in the environment. We are developing the first customizable in-line biosensor platform that will use a microfluidic device to house many different sensor strains, each with the ability to detect a different water contaminant on a continuous basis. Each spatially-isolated strain will fluoresce when its specific target is present in the water, and we have engineered a customized optics and image processing platform that translates these cell signals into a quantitative information about the level of each target present. A major recent innovation for our platform has been the creation of a user-friendly CloudLab prototype that allows users to interact with our sensor using web-based tools. In Phase I, we developed the hardware and software infrastructure to allow our sensor platform to grow into a scalable network that can be monitored and analyzed by web-based tools. In Phase II, we propose a work plan to create a more mature monitoring and analysis system that will integrate diverse sensor inputs and enable a broad range of users to more fully understand their data. By performing field trials with partners in two different disciplines, we will demonstrate the value that our platform can provide to scientific and commercial applications. In terms of broad marketability, there is a critical need for novel in-water nutrient sensors in wastewater, agricultural, and environmental monitoring settings. In addition to working with an academic research group to demonstrate the benefits of our sensor for environmental monitoring, we plan to partner with an industrial algae producer to demonstrate the ability of our sensor to tie into an intelligent control system to boost biomass growth and therefore revenues. Ultimately, our goal is to develop sensing technology that is not only marketable but that provides a broader public benefit. The nation’s groundwater resources face many serious threats including industrial waste, agricultural runoff, sewage, and toxic chemicals used in processes like fracking. An advanced sensor platform that addresses current limitations would allow monitoring to become more affordable, continuous, and field-deployable and thus would address the impacts and costs of water contamination. Therefore, not only will the novel biosensor platform that we are developing be highly marketable to a wide range of end-users, it will meet the increasing need for data to address the increasing public awareness of the health risks associated with contaminated drinking water.