fairfolio
Saved Projects

A Clear Solution: In Silico and Experimental Analysis of Seeds for Affordable and Sustainable Water Purification

CSEF · 2023 Earth & Environmental Sciences Fourth Award

Gao Sarah · 10

Overview

Access to clean water is a major global crisis. Cheap, simple water treatment methods based on local sustainable materials (instead of expensive, inaccessible, and environmentally damaging inorganic chemicals) can potentially democratize clean water access. Moringa oleifera seed extracts are known to treat water by separating pathogens and dirt from water (coagulation and flocculation). They can do this because of the seed protein 2s albumin (MOCBP). However, M. oleifera is not common in many parts of the world and is considered invasive. I sought to find alternative seeds. Instead of a trial-and-error approach, I used bioinformatics techniques to identify seed proteins with high sequence and structural similarity to MOCBP. I discovered 20 plant seed proteins that fit the criteria. Compositional and structural analysis showed that these proteins have many arginines and glutamines (polyglutamine motif), four disulfide bridges, and 3D structures similar to MOCBP. I extracted seed powders from 5 plants and tested their coagulation and flocculation behavior in dirty water compared to M. oleifera seed powder. To measure water quality, I assembled and programmed an Arduino turbidity meter and also used a total dissolved solids (TDS) meter. I also measured conductivity and pH. Finally, I programmed a machine learning model to predict antibacterial peptides that had ~87% accuracy. I found that radish and mabinlang seeds outperformed M. oleifera, the best seed previously. Additionally, my machine learning model identified the seed proteins to be antibacterial. Overall, these seeds could be used to effectively treat water at practically zero cost (3 cents per liter) and with minimal preparation.

Source coverage

This record comes from a published award list, not a complete project archive. Its abstract comes from CSEF's public project showcase as archived by the Internet Archive before judging (https://web.archive.org/web/20230401224130/https://ca-csef.zfairs.com/showcase/ShowcaseInfo?f=838e60b7-ea75-46e8-865c-fde4864244b3); the version presented may differ.

Awards (1)

Competition history

  • CSEF 2023 Earth & Environmental Sciences · Entry S0909

Resources

Related projects

Closest projects by meaning, across every fair and year in the corpus.

Browse more like this

Source: California Science & Engineering Fair public projects

Save projects to your library

Sign in with Google to keep track of projects you find interesting, organized into folders. An account also raises your daily allowance for “Has this been done?”, and lets you create a key for the MCP server with a much higher limit than anonymous use. Browsing stays public.

Continue with Google