Team:HBUT-China/Human Practices
Compared to last year, we have made improvements and more efforts in sharing knowledge related to synthetic biology with the public. We established the iGEM community at our school to introduce not only the competition itself, but synthetic biology and iGEM knowledge to all students as well. We participated in various science and technology forums held on campus. However, in our daily life, we felt deeply the lack of understanding of synthetic biology among the local people. Therefore, we planned to issue a questionnaire to investigate the matter. We were inspired by CCiC to officially issue the questionnaire and analyze the results. Through analysis, it turned out that our concerns were justified, but not as seriously as we thought. So，we investigated and found that many schools in our country, especially high schools, lack biological laboratories, resulting a general paucity of biological knowledge. We strongly believe that we need to start exposing children to the study of these subjects for a young age, so we decided to pursue a cooperative project with a local high school. Since we already had a relationship with OUC-China at CCiC, they allowed us to use the beautiful comics they had designed for the purpose of presenting the subject of synthetic biology in a manner suitable for younger children.Using these comics, we gave high school students a presentation to give them an awareness of synthetic biology. Also, we invited them to come to our lab to learn and communicate during their spare time.
We hope that more people, especially those who are unfamiliar with biological knowledge, will learn about it, and wish this could provide tools, knowledge and opportunities for people who are not familiar with synthetic biology, and have a two-way dialogue with them. We also hope that through our publicity on synthetic biology, more and more people can be inspired and even contribute to this field.
A. Establishing an iGEM community
We have learned that many college students have studied biological knowledge during high school. Some of them have not chosen to major in biology for some reason, who are full of interest in biology. So we established the IGEM community in university campus, eager to bring together like-minded and enthusiastic young people.
(1) Conducting on-campus lectures
So far, we have held two lectures. We have sent invitations throughout the school and hope that all interested students will participate in our lectures. The lectures were conducted in English. In the first lecture, the HBUT-China 2017 team made their participation in the 2017 iGEM team project introduction and the silver prize. They also mentioned the wonderful performance of other teams, such as team videos from other teams. Our event was also recorded by the Science and Technology Department of the College Student Union and a press release was published on the College's official website to report the lecture. The second lecture was in June. It has been more than a month since we determined our project. The InterLab part of the team has also been actively prepared. We introduced the project design ideas and the experimental part of the plan to the audience. arrangement. At the meeting, everyone's attention was very concentrated and they were very fascinated by the content of our lectures. After each lecture, we have a question time for the audience. Everyone asked questions from various aspects, and we patiently made the best answer. Below are some of the questions we have recorded and our answers.
(2) Attend the Science Festival
We were invited to attend the Science Festival.In May, the school held a Science Festival, and the HBUT-China 2018 team were invited to attend. We made our own panel early before the event. When the event officially started, the event venues gradually increased. We introduced all of our team's projects to all the students who came to our booth.
(3) Community cultural activities
In addition to holding lectures, participating in academic-related activities, and sharing with the public, we also have a variety of community cultural activities. After the discussion is exhausted, we will bring the guitar and relax outdoors. If the weather permits, members of the community will gather and sing and dance together in the Central District playground on Friday night of the second week of each month. We have also held several IGEM special English Corner events, and we will invite our foreign language instructors together. All the participants came to conduct English free talks.
B. Teaching in high school classrooms
We spend most of our energy on contacting with the student group. We hope that more students will follow their hearts and be brave enough to choose to study deeper in the biological field and can make a huge contribution . We went to the high school classes to communicate with them and hope to bring them together to appreciate the fun of biological knowledge. We understand the child's preferences, so we worked with the OUC-China team and printed a comic book they made. Firstly introduced in the form of comics, and brought them into the world of biology.
C. OpenLab Activity
In the process of publicity and communication in high school, we learned that they do not have a biological laboratory. But we all understand that "experiment is the only criterion for testing truth." In the subsequent inquiries, we found that the students mastered the knowledge in the textbooks very well, but little is known in the actual operation. So we decided to conduct a lab open day event and invited several high school students to come to our lab to study and personally operate an experiment.
We are eager to get in touch with more people，not merely the student group. Introduce them to the knowledge of synthetic biology and learn their knowledge and expectation of synthetic biology.
Q&A
Q: the competition affect your study? How do you balance your study life and preparations for the competition?
A: We are constantly learning and progressing during the competition. For example, we just learned the principle and operation of the spectrometer, and actually used the knowledge we learned when doing the experiment. As long as you listen carefully in the classroom and do your homework after class, your grades will be good.
2. Q: Can the engineering of bacteria designed by your team only detect the concentration of nickel ions? Is there any absorption?
A: At the moment, it only detects and measures; in the future we hope to design an absorption system based on yeast.
3. Q: How do you recycle the yeast after absorbing nickel ions?
A: Removing the yeast from the water after absorption of Nickel ions would be ideal. We only need to release nickel ions from cells under a certain circumstance，but though we can do this fairly easily in the lab, we don’t yet have a practical solution for large scale field application. Perhaps this will be next year’s project.
4. Q: With so many people, What difficulties have you encountered? How did you solve it?
A:A team is a big family. They are different people with different personalities. Everyone thinks differently. There are also many different opinions. We mainly seek common ground while reserving differences. Different ideas can lead to a lot of good ideas. Mainly the people of our team are very friendly , so everyone is very close and united like family.
Questionnaire Survey
We designed a questionnaire to try to understand the Chinese people's views on water pollution, heavy metal pollution, and their understanding of synthetic biology. Through investigation, we found some people still hold some misunderstandings, so we performed the Public Education above after this questionnaire survey.
Nickel is an essential life element of the human body. Nickel deficiency can cause diabetes, anemia, cirrhosis, uremia, renal failure, abnormalities in liver lipids and phospholipid metabolism. However, nickel is also the most common allergic metal. Nickel ions can penetrate into the skin through pores and sebaceous glands, causing skin irritation and inflammation. Worse， excessive nickel intake is poisonous . Ingestion of 250 mg of soluble nickel per day can cause poisoning. The most common symptoms are dermatitis, respiratory disorders and respiratory cancer. The survey shows that nickel content is positively correlated with the mortality of nasopharyngeal carcinoma, and nickel may be one of the causative factors of leukemia. Nickel-containing wastewater can be produced in industries such as mining, metallurgy, machine building, chemicals, instrumentation, petrochemicals, textiles, steel mills, iron foundries, automotive and aircraft manufacturing, printing, ink, ceramics, and glass. But the existing methods of treatment are always unsatisfactory. So we created this project, trying to use our knowledge of synthetic biology to detect and remove nickel from water resources. Based on this, we would like to know the Chinese people's awareness of China's water pollution and heavy metal pollution, as well as their knowledge and acceptance of synthetic biology, in order to fully complete this project. Therefore, we designed a questionnaire, then analyzed the results in this report.
To investigate the current status of awareness about nickel pollution and synthetic biology among Chinese people so as to provide scientific data to guide future science popularization and education efforts.
957 Chinese respondents filled in an online questionnaire.
957 Chinese respondents were investigated by random sampling in an online survey from August 6th to August 14th 2018 (8 days in total). The anonymous questionnaire was of our own design. The data was collected and analyzed using SOJUMP online.
A total of 957 competed questionnaires were collected in this investigation. Most of the population was among the 18-25 and 41-50 year old age groups, respectively accounting for 66.04% and 11.18% of the total. The age of the sample was thus somewhat different from the national population. This is perhaps expected for online surveys, which generally tend to skew towards younger and better-educated respondents.
In the survey population, most of them are students，accounting for 64.37% of all respondents.
About half (53.61%) of the respondents felt that the water pollution situation was normal. 27.06% people felt that the pollution was serious. For everyone's usual drinking water, few people (23.3%) is relieved. most people think that the source of water pollution is industrial pollution (85.79%) and domestic wastewater and garbage (84.74%). Most people are more worried about water pollution to the human body (69.17%) and aquatic animals ( 63.95%).At the same time, most people (83.49%) believe that the problem of improving water quality is mainly the responsibility of the polluting enterprises themselves. Although more people (68.03%) understand the environmental pollution and harm to humans caused by heavy metal ions, only 16.61% of the methods for treating nickel pollution with microorganisms have no worries, and only about half of them (52.25%) completely willing to use the microbiologically treated aquatic products that our team plans to develop. This shows that most people still have some understanding of water pollution and heavy metal pollution. However, there is still a certain psychological burden for using biological methods to deal with water pollution. Therefore, our follow-up publicity and public education are very necessary.
Among the 957 respondents, most of them heard (46.08%), understood (11.7%) or learned (8.46%) about synthetic biology. Only 2.93% people’s attitude towards synthetic biology is objected. However, 42.01% people expressed concern. I think most people may be worried about the ethical issues of synthetic biology.
According to this survey, we learned that with the development of science and technology, it has also brought more and more environmental pollution problems. Most people say that there is a certain amount of pollution in life, and everyone is also concerned about pollution, and express the eager hope and concern for solving the pollution problem. This is gratifying.
As for synthetic biology, its awareness rate is greater than our expectations, but there is still a long way to go in science education, especially in biological methods for waste water treatment and synthetic biology. On the one hand, we have to appropriately strengthen people's concerns about biological methods for treating sewage. On the other hand, we must work harder to increase the popularity of synthetic biology and try to shape a more positive and realistic biological image, especially considering that it is not just environmentally friendly. It is the responsibility of iGEMers to focus on the popularization and improvement of synthetic biology.
Conference of China iGEMer Community
The ShanghaiTech University, the organizer of the 5th Conference of China iGEMer Community(CCiC), is a beautiful and modern university. They held a very successful and meaningful conference. Everyone learned a lot from it. There were many excellent doctors who had some wonderful academic report. There were also many senior iGEMer who were very patient for us to answer questions. And there were also tea breaks and other arrangements for everyone to communicate. On CCiC, almost all the outstanding universities in China had gathered together. We not only discussed each other's iGEM projects, but also talked about learning and living. CCiC let our team members exchange experiences with many excellent people, help our iGEM team develop better, and let us be more determined to do our best.Last but not least, it let us love biology more!
Our biggest gaining is to learn the HP projects of many excellent universities and helped our team make progress. Learning from the excellent work of other universities, we also benefited a lot,which let us have time to improve our problems. There we got a lot of inspirations and improved our work:
1. In terms of questionnaires, we studied various ways of asking questions from other outstanding universities.So changed some of the sentences we set up to make our questions more subtle and more meaningful.
2. CCiC built a bridge for iGEMers. Thanks to it，We have the cooperation with OUC-China . They designed a comic about synthetic biology, which are very cute and easy to understand. It is very suitable for us to pass on the synthetic biology knowledge to the children. They are also very willing to accept this form of teaching.
3. We have a wide variety of HP. During the presentation, we listed them one by one but it was too complicated. So when we are in Boston, we will pay more attention to this and pick HP highlights to introduce. The above problems also exist in the experimental part. We should take a more concise expression. We explained too many experimental details, but we did not grasp enough in the overall work introduction. We improved PPt to make it clearer and easier to understand.
4. As for poster, we also got a lot of inspiration through CCiC. We improved it and made the poster layout design more reasonable. We also beautified the poster style and enriched the poster content.
（1）The first time we came to ShanghaiTech University, we signed in first!
（2）We feel very honored to take a photo with iGEM’s VP Meagan and board member Rick Johnson.
（3）Presentation
（4）This CCiC trip allowed us to collide and integrate with other teams. The picture shows the communication with Peking University iGEMers
（5）The picture shows our team members explaining posters to other people who are interested in us.
Meeting with Dr. Lei Dai and other iGEMers.
HBUT-China 2018 participated in three main aspects of integrated human practice. First, we focused on the issue of lake protection and management in Wuhan, and conducted a field survey. Inspired by a staff member on the front line of a Wuhan Lake Protection agency, we decided to design a machine that detects the concentration of nickel ions in the environment. To better help solve environmental problems, we actively searched the literature, then using what we found, designed and built a nickel ion detection system in S. cerevisiae.
Our country attaches great importance to the construction of an ecological civilization, and promotes a basic national policy to protect the environment.
Our project aims to address the problem of nickel ion pollution in water. In Wuhan, water resources account for one quarter of the city area, and there are more than 200 lakes throughout the city. We learned from the newspaper that the speed of modernization of Wuhan has accelerated in recent years. The conflicts between lakes and urban commercial land are becoming more and more serious. The protection of lakes is urgent, and the call for protecting them is growing. In addition to the education of the public about synthetic biology, we feel that it is very necessary to investigate the protection and management of lakes in Wuhan in general, and so we cooperated with the HBUT Dandelion Volunteer Service Team. We conducted questionnaire surveys among ordinary citizens, interviewed government departments, and visited private lake protection organizations to understand the current status of lake protection and management in Wuhan. We designed a set of questionnaires, and then we generated a report summary of these results, in the hope that we can gain inspiration from the research results, confirm the effectiveness of our project, and provide a theoretical basis and significance for our envisioned machine. Finally, we will strengthen our project and practice our experimental results, which will contribute to the lake protection work in Wuhan.
During the interviews with the Wuhan Lake Management Bureau, the Aihu Baihu Volunteers Association, and the Research Lake Park Management Office, HBUT-China introduced them to the design ideas of our team's project, the theoretical basis of the biology, and the experiment expectations. A staff member of the Wuhan Lake Protection First Line working in the Wuhan Lake Administration has expressed interest in our project and was very supportive of our work. He appreciated us, and his evaluation of our work was very encouraging.
He said: "You are a very good team, make full use of your spare time, based on the knowledge you have learned and even explore deeper knowledge. In order to design topics that benefit the city, the country and the world, let the world change through research. Better. There are many heavy metals that cause water pollution. Your project is to measure the nickel ion concentration. I hope that you can make a test project more specific and more systematic. At the same time, measuring only heavy metal concentration is not enough, you can try to solve the pollution problem. In any case, I am very happy to see that the team of college students like you are actively designing to help solve the environmental pollution problem. I hope that you will continue to work hard and make the project better and better."
He expressed his hope that our final experimental results will meet our expectations.
Our publicity can help people improve their environmental awareness. We also hope that our project will be improved and applied to help relevant departments deal with and reduce water pollution.
We want to put the detection system into a device that enables real-time detection of nickel ion content in the sample. See more
Although we invested a lot of thought into the detection system, and enhanced the efficiency of detection, it was only half of the solution. To substantially reduce nickel ion contamination, we must design a system that can be used to absorb nickel ions. See more
Design A Device
We will do this for our design products. We put the engineered bacteria containing the genetic line into the injection tray of the machine with tin foil paper. The injection tank has a thermostat device, which can ensure the temperature of the bacteria is not fluctuate in real time. Through chip processing, photoelectric conversion module and wireless module, it converts bioluminescence into digital signals and transmits them to our mobile phones for real-time monitoring.
Design an absorb system
After reviewing the previous works and related contents of the literature, we have identified the biological chassis of this system as S. Cerevisiae. Yeast has a vacuole that is not found in E. coli, and the vacuole is an organelle that is isolated from the intracellular environment. Nickel ions are toxic to cells; however, if we store the ions in their vacuoles instead of their cell environment, we would greatly increase its resistance to nickel ions. This would make it a good candidate to achieve our purpose of capturing large amounts of nickel ions. We found a nickel ion transporter, TgMTP1t2, in a cell of a plant called Thlaspi goesingense hyperaccumulator, which is expressed in the vacuoles of these cells, which we subsequently successfully expressed on our S. cerevisiae cells. However, we thought that the capture of nickel ions by the yeast should be a gradual process, that is, first from the outside to the inside of the cell, and then from the cell environment into the vacuole. So we hope to find a gene that can transport nickel ions from outside the cell into the cell. We found a nickel-ion transporter called TjZNT1 on the ultra-nickel-resistant plant called Thlaspi japonicum, which is a ZIP family located on the cell membrane. According to the literature, this protein has been successfully expressed on S. cerevisiae cells and can achieve the purpose of transporting nickel ions. So, as of now, we have found two nickel ion transporters and want to express them in S. cerevisiae for nickel ion capture purposes. Due to limited time, we have not built the relevant mechanism, but hopefully next year we can build this system.
Human Practices
OVERVIEW
Education
Club activities
Public Engagement
More Human Practices Parts
Questionnaire Survey
Investigative Report on Public Awareness of Nickel Pollution and Synthetic Biology
Introduction
Objective
Subjects
Methods
Results
General demographic situation
Age structure
Occupation
Awareness of water，heavy metal pollution
Awareness of synthetic biology
Analysis chart
Conclusion
Conference of China iGEMer Community
OVERVIEW
Research on Lake Protection and Management in Wuhan
Abstract
Report
INSPIRATIONS
Design A Device
Design an absorb system
