Water Supply in Developing Countries: Student Experiences in the Dominican Republic

In 2010, the United Nations established access to safe drinking water as a basic human right; however, many areas around the globe still lack access. The interdisciplinary service-learning course “Water Supply in Developing Countries” was established at Purdue in 2012 to address the complex issue of water insecurity around the world. Over the past five years, the course has produced teams involving students from nursing, engineering, agricultural economics, biology, and food science working together to develop sustainable, community-scale drinking water treatment systems. In partnership with Aqua Clara International, the student team in 2017 established a drinking water treatment system at the Ana Julia Diaz Luna primary school in the rural community of Las Cañas, Dominican Republic. In addition to the focus on a physical water system, they also collaborated with local educators to design a water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) education program. Students guided development of sustainable economic strategies to utilize the system for generation of revenue to reinvest in maintenance and improvements. The observations and lessons learned from the completed stages of this project have been applied to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of subsequent interventions

Global Service-Learning: A Systematic Review of Principles and Practices

Related dataset is at https://doi.org/10.7302/wazb-wk46 and also listed in the dc.relation field of the full item record.Global service-learning brings students, instructors, and communities together to support learning and community development across borders. In global service-learning, practitioners act at the intersection of two fields: service-learning and international development. Critical scholarship in all service-learning and international development has highlighted the tensions inherent in defining and tracking “success” in community development. In response, service-learning and international development have turned considerable attention to documenting project characteristics, also known as best practices or success factors, that support equitable, sustainable community development. This article presents a systematic synthesis of these fields’ best practices in the context of global service-learning. The authors propose 18 guiding principles for project design to support practitioners in creating and maintaining justice-oriented, stakeholder-driven projects. The authors compare these principles to emerging best practices in global service-learning and assess the contribution of service-learning and international development research to informing the future of the field.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/171267/1/Hawes et al_2021_Global Service-Learning.pdfSEL

Colorimetric and Bacteriophage-Based Detection of Foodborne Pathogens

The significant toll of foodborne pathogens on human health and the economy has been well-established. Thus, the primary goal for many researchers and the agencies charged with monitoring the food supply is to improve upon detection systems for these pathogens via reductions in cost, complexity, limits of detection, and time to detection. One such avenue which has been explored in this work is the development of foodborne pathogen detection systems which result in easily visible color changes to media in the presence of the target bacterium. To this end, a scientific marriage between two naturally occurring phenomena, chromoproteins from coral and integrative temperate bacteriophage ɸV10, was explored as a means of specifically targeting, stably infecting, and ultimately detecting Escherichia coli O157:H7. A gene originally from the coral Acropora millepora, amilCP, was optimized for expression in E. coli O157:H7 and homologously recombined into the ɸV10 bacteriophage genome. The expression of amilCP in infected E. coliO157:H7 results in the accumulation of the chromoprotein, causing the cells to appear purple in color. Infection kinetics and limits of detection with this system were explored, as well as ways to optimize the resulting color production through culturing variables. Additionally, the process of translating recombinant ɸV10 detection strategies into formulations suited for integration into commercial applications was pursued in this work. Methods for storage of recombinant ɸV10 without the needs for refrigeration and aqueous buffers were investigated to facilitate their eventual transition to commercial detection platforms. ɸV10 stocks were printed onto dissolvable paper, lyophilized using various formulations, and attempted to be covalently linked to superparamagnetic particles. The conclusions from these experiments provided key insights into how ɸV10 reporter phages respond to various processing conditions and may point to a successful anhydrous packaging strategy to yield extended shelf-life at ambient temperatures. Finally, a semi-quantitative, differential culturing method was developed targeting Listeria species in fluid milk. This process involves combining two established protocols: the standardized initial enrichment medium used by the European Union for Listeria, and a field-ready most probable number enumeration technology. The data presented here give legitimacy to the expansion of bacterial targets of this technology to include Listeria, a deleterious foodborne pathogen in its own right