Team:BIT-China/Human Practices
In order to make sure that we have enough time to a better preparation, we started recruiting players in mid-March. We hold a group meeting every week to conduct "Brain Storm". In the first few weeks, everyone can come up with his or her own interesting ideas. After a few weeks' "Storm", we identified the final project purpose. After that, we started with different entry points according our purpose, reviewed a large number of literature and reviews, and reported them regularly. At the same time, we realized that we needed to make sure our project is meaningful for the society. Therefore, we did some surveys.
During Brainstorm, we basically determined that this year we want to build a cell-detector of antioxidants. In order to evaluate whether this has the significance of implementation and whether it is the core of people's attention, we conducted some surveys.
We designed a questionnaire about antioxidant products and the way to test them. And we also tried to clarify whether the public is familiar with synthetic biology.
After the investigation, we gained a lot. We were very glad that more and more people around us knew and started to pay attention to synthetic biology and had a strong interest in biotechnology. This really excited us. As for the part about antioxidants, we also had some positive results. According to what we learned, about 60.77% of people had used products contains antioxidants, such as vitamin C, astaxanthin capsules. However, most people questioned whether these products really have antioxidant effects. And they hoped to establish a set of antioxidants detection method in living cells so that it can be more accurate and efficient. At the same time, about 89.3% of the people made clear that the establishment of this kind of system will be helpful when choosing antioxidants products.
This was a very meaningful investigation. It not only gave us confidence in executing our idea, but also helped us established the purpose of our project.
On July 24th, we were invited to take part a meeting upheld by International Teenager Competition and Communication Center on campus of USTB, during which 4 teams shared the experimental process about their project and feelings of iGEM. We made a brief introduction to our project and answered questions asked by experts and journalist, in which we gained a better insight into our project.
We participated in an exchange meeting organized by team Peking. The other teams are team Tsinghua, UCAS, BNU, THU, OUC. Every team had a presentation on their projects, including the idea, the process, and their superiority. We received a lot of pertinent suggestions from other teams, which helped a lot to our project. Especially, team Peking gave us plenty of suggestions and we had a pleasant discussion. Due to these, we set a collaboration with team Peking.
By the end of August, we had preliminarily completed all parts of experimental verification, constructed the relevant proteins, and verified the strength of each promoter. In order to further improve our project and make progress with other teams from communication, we participated in CCIC. CCIC (Central China iGEM Consortium) is a national iGEM exchange meeting held by domestic universities, which provides an important pre-competition exchange and learning platform for teams from China. It not only promotes the exchange and cooperation between the national iGEM teams, but also further promote synthetic biology to domestic universities. Taking part in CCIC allowed us to have a more profound understanding of our own project, so as to find some improving thoughts, and a few other teams reached a friendly cooperation on the project design with our team. Through the expert's reports and several predecessors experience exchange, we had solved many confusion in our laboratory, and had a deeper understanding of synthetic biology.
In mid-August, we completed several gene building and testing. COFCO, one of the world's top 500 companies with a good reputation in the international grain and oil food market, became our first interviewee. The meeting had three parts. Firstly, we introduced our project to the COFCO. Then, they asked us some questions about the project. After that, we asked them about the market of current antioxidant products. Through communication, we learned that the sales of anti-oxidant products are on the rise, and more and more people are pursuing anti-oxidant and anti-aging products. Therefore, we have more reasons to believe that our project has a good application prospect in the market. We would do our best to make the project more reasonable and more beneficial to the world.
In order to figure out what we can do by our system, we visited Wehand-bio, a leading innovative pharmaceutical company in Beijing. During the meeting, we gave a brief introduction of our design to show the idea of our living antioxidant detection device, and they talked about their current research. After the discussion, we found that there is another application of antioxidants which is used in medicines. As they told us, almost all of the medicines would use antioxidants to prevent oxidation of medicines. So our system could also be applied in pharmaceutical production. What’s more, they offered us a good idea about testing whether the natural antioxidant products will deteriorate in quality over time. As you can see, this discussion had let us take a deeper look at how to use our system more widely.
