Team:SCUT-ChinaA/Human Practices

iGEM is not only a competition, but also a grand event. We hope to create different colors in this carnival, contributing to the development of synthetic biology.

Summary

Our human practice mainly included three phases. The first phase was the original intention of our project. The second stage was the problem we found during the completion of our project. The last phase was how to use our own methods to influence people's thinking and let more people know and understand iGEM and synthetic biology.

Our original intention was to create a new biosynthetic system by redesigning existing natural biological systems and rerouting their metabolic systems. In turn, the existing high-pollution chemical plants all can be transformed into non-polluting, low-energy, high-output biological cell factories. In the process of researching chemical companies, we found a essential problem: most of the chemical industries today are highly polluting industries. Wastewater, waste gas, and waste disposal are complicated and difficult to disposed, and the disposal of these wastes adds extra expense to enterprises, reducing corporate profits. So, we see a future like that:

The biochemical plant will replace the current high-contamination and high-energy chemical plants.

Based on this phenomenon, we have sensitively noticed that synthetic biology will certainly come to the historical stage and have increasingly voices in the entire scientific community. Under such a development, an urgent problem appears unavoidably: What do people think about synthetic biology, which is gaining more and more attention in the scientific community? Is our society environment ready for the biological?

To find out the answer, we first distributed questionnaires to the public for social research, and we got amazing results:

Click here to see the full survey.

It can be seen from the data that the public has given high hopes to the bio-industry, but at the same time, there is an unknown fear of the bio-industry. With such contradictory and interesting results, we can obviously get some convincing conclusions. After discussion with professors and experts, we found that the public's fear mainly comes from the unknown of synthetic biology and even biology.

Humans are interested in the unknown and meanwhile, have a fear of it.

In order to eliminate the public's fear, our team decided to proceed from two aspects. The first thing to do is to give the public an appropriate science popularization education to eliminate subjective fear, and in the meantime, to use the means closest to people's lives to eliminate people's potential fear. Finally, we broadened our project and designed convenient and feasible software for enterprises to select metabolic plans in biochemical plants.

Silver

Collaboration

During the project, of course, it is indispensable to communicate with other iGEM teams. Therefore, we exchanged opinions with many other iGEM teams to solve the problems we encountered together. Among them, we have carried out further cooperation and communication with the two iGEM teams: Sun Yat-sen University and South China Agricultural University. We finished an indispensable part of each other’s projects and made critical work.

SYSU-software is a friendly and open team. We had a meetup and exchange our project. With a presentation, they introduced their software to us, a multi-functional collaboration platform. Their software amazed us and we thought it can be useful in genetic circuit collaboration design. However, they ignored a fact that experimental protocol was also an important element in collaboration. So, in the meetup, we came up with this idea. They took much amount of it and verified their software based on our suggestion, adding a new function of editing protocol.

The team from South China Agricultural University is also friendly and accommodating. In our project, they helped us determine differences in yeast growth and tested for its activity. At the same time, we helped them extract the Acetobacter xylinum genome. Both of us have made a contribution that cannot be ignored to each other.

Self-enhancement

As scientific researchers, we must have a scientific basis for all our work, and repeatedly verify the arisen, upcoming and potential problems. Therefore, we need experts from different fields to help answer our questions in various fields. To learn about the latest research trends and enrich our project, we came to the 4th Seminar on Synthetic Biology Young Scholars.

Safety

Although Yarrowia lipolytica has undergone many tests and is a relatively mature engineered strain, but if we still have to ensure that they are always within safe limits through good laboratory practices and careful awareness. In addition, we understand environmental and personal protective measures and strictly comply with the requirements in the laboratory to prevent leakage or contamination risks.

Education

Although more and more people are paying attention to synthetic biology and molecular biology, there are still many people who have misunderstandings about biology or fear of biological tools such as transgenic technology and gene editing technology. To let more people learn about biology, we went to elementary school and brought the latest biological knowledge to the children there.



Public engagement

While conducting our experimental projects, we also actively organized or participated in communications with other iGEM teams. Through learning exchange activities again and again, we continued to draw on one of the parties and eventually improved our project.

Gold

Software tools

After consulting with several fermentation engineering experts and conducting field research, we found that how to screen out the optimal wiring method is the most important thing in establishing cell engineering. So, in order to achieve the goal of the cell factory, we modeled the metabolic pathway of Yarrowia lipolytica and finally designed an available software, which can obtain the corresponding optimal metabolic by simply inputting and outputting data.

iGEM popularizationls

In the process of communicating with the outside world, we found that synthetic biology is still only a few people's carnival, which is still unattainable for most ordinary people. So we have organized many science education activities, not only describing our project to the public, but also popularizing science education and promoting iGEM. In this process, we gained a lot of partners, and under our promotion, we were honored to guide Jinshan High School to participate in next year's iGEM.

Social work

After our research and analysis, we found that most people are looking forward to synthetic biology, but they also have concerns. So, we need a more suitable entry point to integrate synthetic biology into more people's lives instead of boring presentation. In order to keep up with the footsteps of the Internet era, we rely on WECHAT to develop a set of emojis that can be applied to normal life, hoping to bring the distance between synthetic biology and ordinary people closer, and attract them to understand the interest of biology. We are very happy that this set of emojis has been well received by students.