This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: If you're reading this, your body probably contains forever chemicals. Forever chemicals, also known as PFAS (short for per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances), can be found in more than 90% of Americans, who are exposed to the chemicals in consumer products, food and drinking water.
In the last two decades, PFAS have been linked to multiple health problems, including some cancers, developmental delays and behavior problems in children, decreased fertility, weaker immune responses and obesity. The biggest source of PFAS exposure for many people comes out of their kitchen tap, with nearly half of U.S. municipal water supplies known to contain PFAS. As states act to reduce PFAS in drinking water supplies, a team of Columbia and City College scientists, led by Virginia Cornish, professor of chemistry and systems biology at Columbia University, is working to make the process easier and more efficient.
The team is building a "biohybrid" device—using engineered yeast, AI-designed proteins and complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) integrated-circuit sensor chips—that will help municipal water systems detect the levels of forever chemicals and monitor their removal. Under the new rules, municipal water suppliers are required to test for PFAS frequently, but current PFAS detection methods are costly. Most suppliers will need to send samples to commercial labs that use expensive mass spectrometry machines to measure PFAS concentrations.
Delays in receiving results—commercial labs sometimes take weeks to send reports—will also be a problem for municipal systems that must remove PFAS. These systems will need real-time results to closely monitor the removal equipment and determine when components need replacement. "There are approximately 150,000 public water systems in the United States, and PFAS monitoring is becoming a huge cost for them," says Alex Rosenthal, professor of civil engineering at City College.
"We've talked to several dozen water industry professionals around the country, and there is unanimous excitement about how our new technology can optimize operations." Biology can provide a cheaper, faster way to detect chemicals. Over the years, the Cornish lab has perfected a way to turn Saccharomyces cerevisiae, the same yeast species used by bread makers and beer brewers, into single-celled versions of the sniffer dogs at airports that can detect explosives or illegal drugs hidden in luggage. "The dogs detect chemicals from these substances because their noses have odor receptors that bind to those chemicals," Cornish explains.
"With genetic engineering and synthetic biology, we can design the same type of chemical-detecting receptors and implant them into yeast." In the Cornish lab, a protein that detects a specific chemical is first designed and then inserted into yeast cells. These synthetic receptors are connected to a fluorescent protein, also inserted into the cells, so that when the synthetic receptors bind to the chemical of interest, the yeast glow green. The intensity of the glow is related to the chemical's concentration.
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