Team:GDSYZX/Human Practices

Silver

HUMAN PRACTICE

It is our bounden duty to protect the environment, so that we design this project to treat some of the common pollution problems in our daily life. It’s a vital part of our human practice that we need to understand how severe the pollution is around us. We collected samples by on-the-spot investigation. First, we collected some soil near our school and Guangzhou Steel New Town. Then we went to The Pearl River near Zhujiang New Town, Donghe Surge and Dongpu to take some water samples.During the sampling,we used Five-spot sampling which we learnt at classes to collect the samples.

We went to visit a sewage treatment work. There, we understood the way to dispose the living garbage and the heavy metal garbage in our city. We really walked into disposal site so that we understood how the device processed, how to make the waste water clean and how a process flow is used in industry at present. They usually use physical sedimentation and chemical decomposition to deal with heavy metal pollution. This treatment is time-consuming, expensive and even less efficient.

We also communicated with other team except interviewing the experts and professors. During the free time between experiments, we communicated with other IGEM teams such as SYSU-CHINA and SCAU-CHINA. Team SYSU-CHINA taught us how to use our plasmids Ppic9k better. We learned something we never met in high school, too. We knew how to make our wiki more beautiful by using knowledge about art design and some skills of using PS, AI and so on from Team SCAU-CHINA.

We helped another IGEM team, GZHS-UNITE, transform a gene named NS1-GFP. They also help to do our research.

In order to understand what attitudes people have, towards our project and the heavy metal pollution in the area where they live. We sent out questionnaires which we designed. We have both online questionnaires and offline questionnaires. With the help of the internet, we have 5900 questionnaires inquestionnaires in 9 provinces. Only through the survey could we learn that people think what is the most critical element of the biological heavy metal pollution treatment program. Also, with the help of questionnaires, it will be easier for us to consummate our project

In addition to gathering public opinions, we also interviewed several experts and professors in the field and knew our project's advantages and disadvantages. One of our teammates, Fu Yao, interviewed John McGeary, the Associate professor of Brown University. Most of the advice he gave mentioned the safety part. For example,

  • We don’t always know every function of every gene, so if we release it into the wild to clean up heavy metal water pollution, there might be unanticipated consequences, there might be something that happen because of those changes in gene that we don’t know that is going to happen in the yeast.
  • One genetic variation has impact on multiple phenotypes. If we only focus on one phenotype, maybe there is another one we don’t know and it might cause different kinds of problems.
  • Whether it can be a good product to sell in the market or not depends on what happen on yeast afterward.
  • It is hard to imagine if the yeast captures the heavy metal and stores them, he is sure that there is a way to contain the contamination won’t spread any further.
  • Two big concerns of our project: what happens to those yeasts, and there are no other things that these genes are related to.
  • When we want to find other phenotypes of gene, we use reverse genetics (start with the gene, and we go through all the impacts that it has), but there are thousands of phenotypes so we have to test all of them. modal system is useful but not perfect (it cannot capture all human complexities), and it is hard to guess everything that might happen when we change one gene.

We also interviewed professors Zheng Lingling at the school of life sciences at Sun Yat-sen University She asked us what the yeast would end up like and what the absorption limit is. And she also advised us to test the conditions for yeast to survive in water, and compare our methods with the existing methods and so on. It is really helpful for us to improve our project and found our direction more easily.

Furthermore, we uploaded videos which we made to website, let more people know deeper about Biology from the videos. We went to our former middle school to taught students some knowledge about synthetic biology. We also introduced our project to them. A middle school student informed us about IGEM and indicated that he would like to participate in this competition next year. We applied for a club about synthetic biology in our school. Our original intention was to let more people know about IGEM and it worked. Also, it would be more convenient for the members of the next year IGEM team to found their team. And this would let more students in our school know more about Biology.