the Global Water Center in Milwaukee’s Walker’s Point neighborhood. The facility was opened last year by The Water Council.
Microbe Detectives was accepted in July 2013 into a pilot seed accelerator program for water technology startups at the Global Water Center. The program, which launched in September, earned Ghylin a $50,000 grant from the Wisconsin Economic Development Corp.; office space in the center; access to business model and operations training through UW-Whitewater’s Institute for Water Business; access to faculty and students from UW-Milwaukee’s School of Freshwater Sciences; and guidance from local water technology experts.
Ghylin also kicked in about $2,000 of his own money.
He hired three part-time staff: a biomolecular engineer, a biomolecular engineering undergraduate student at Milwaukee School of Engineering, and a UW-Whitewater graduate with a bachelor’s degree in geography and environmental studies, he said. He also hired three subcontractors to handle graphic design and marketing, patent law, and Web design.
Ghylin said that so far Microbe Detectives is breaking even. He charges clients—so far mainly environmental engineering firms and consultants—between $100 and $600 per order, depending on the scope of the work and if the client plans to be a repeat customer, he said.
With a typical order, the customer mails a sample to Microbe Detectives, which does filtration and other front-end work before sending it to a lab in Texas that performs the DNA sequencing. Microbe Detectives then uses “proprietary knowledge, microbial databases, and bioinformatics algorithms” to analyze the raw data and draw digestible conclusions for the client about what’s lurking in the sample.
The process can help find the source of fecal pollution, detect biofilms in drinking water distribution systems, and investigate taste, odor and color problems in drinking water. The method also has applications for environmental remediation, the food and beverage industry, personal care products, and pharmaceutical manufacturing, according to Microbe Detectives’ website.
Turnaround time for an analysis is currently as low as two days, but with more investment and growth in business, Ghylin wants to shrink that to six hours. Compare that with fecal pollution tracking in urban waterways that in some cases can require more than two months to get data and pinpoint the source of the pollution after sampling from storm sewers, Ghylin said.
“It’s closer to a real-time analysis than what we had before,” said Kevin Shafer, executive director of the Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewerage District, who has met with Ghylin to learn about his business. “It has a lot of potential in making wastewater plants and storm water utilities around the country more efficient in dealing with analysis of water quality in the future.”
The challenges? Although costs are coming down, the equipment for DNA sequencing is still expensive, and applying it to water samples is still relatively unchartered territory for academia, let alone industry, Ghylin said.
“The technology is still not at the point where it could be deployed like that for [municipal water] monitoring, and the [U.S. Environmental Protection Agency] is not requiring it. So that’s a little ways down the road,” Ghylin said. “But in a few years you might see this become a really routine test.”
There’s only been a handful of research papers on the topic. Sandra McLellan, a professor and senior scientist at UW-Milwaukee’s School of Freshwater Sciences, is working on one using genetic sequencing to identify fecal pollution sources.
“The whole idea of using sequence data as a way to look at water…is in its infancy,” McLellan said.
She sees value in Ghylin’s attempt to make such information “useful to the practitioner” in the field. The challenge is in properly interpreting vast, complex data sets containing millions of sequences, she said.
“I think in 10 years what he is proposing is exactly what we ought to be doing,” McLellan said. “He’s really setting the groundwork to create those conduits between research and the end user.”
