Team:IISER-Mohali/Applied Design

 
 

Product Design

“From Project to Product”

Traditional solutions for the “RAT MENACE” are:

Trapping: With cages, snap traps and glue pads

Traps are placed in locations where there exists more possibility for the arrival of rats, baits are placed as attractants and it is expected that the rat falls for the bait and gets trapped.

Poisoning:

Several farmer like the ones in Chilla, Raipur Khurd, and Durali make use of Anticoagulants and Metal Phosphides (like Aluminum Phosphide), Upon ingestion (if ingested), rats either suffer a renal failure due to blocking of the Vitmain K cycle leading to the inability to produce essential blood clotting factors (like Prothrombin) or die due to the production of toxic Phosphine gas in the stomach of the rats by the reaction of metal phosphide with the acid in the stomach.

Rat Repellents:

Many households and newspaper storage industries use rat repellents like naphthalene balls, ammonia, and peppermint oil. The smell of them causes irritation to rats, which is supposed to cause them to vacate the region.

High-Pitch Noise Machine:

They produce sound waves in the Ultrasonic frequency range. The sound is supposed to irritate the rats and cause them to vacate the region.

Fumigation:

Large Government Warehouses use fumigation with chemical sprays to protect their grains from rodent infestation.

Silos:

Many high-income farmers use aluminum silos with airtight seals to store their grain. This keeps the grain safe from the attack of rats and also keeps them safe from environmental degradation including rotting.

What They Lack?

Trapping:

It relies on the fact that rats get fooled by bait; but they are smarter than you would think (as with other vertebrate pests). Glue pads are able to capture rats once they step on the pad, but are inhumane. The rat tries to escape and in turn gets entangled even further. In its natural response to flee, it tries to escape until it rips itself apart and slowly dies.

Poisoning:

At least in India, rats are considered holy and there exist temples where rats are maintained and worshiped as incarnations of Goddess Karni Mata’s children. This leads to serious ethical issues with killing rats. It is also seen that rats can at times avoid the poison completely and if they do ingest it, it is followed by a long painful death. These rats move about and drop dead in the holes and crevices that they stumble upon.The dead body then decomposes and becomes a source of diseases that affect both animals and humans. When other animals eat the dead rat, the poison enters the food web leading to secondary poisoning and biomagnification of harmful chemicals which can easily crawl up trophic levels to reach human beings. Furthermore, the poison itself can be eaten by other harmless animals and even little unsuspecting children leading to poisoning and/or death.

High Pitch Noise Machines:

It is found that after a while rats get habituated to the noise rendering the above technique ineffective. This makes sense, given that noise acts as a repellent rather than a deterrent, so there is no survival value that murines gain by avoiding this noise.

Fumigation:

The chemical sprays are sprayed all over the Warehouse including on top of grain leading to the contamination of the grain. This causes the grains to be covered with the toxic chemical rodenticide, in turn making them poisonous. The situation is at such a stage that the Food Safety and Standards Authority of India (FSSAI) mandates regular quality checks of the grains in these store houses.

Even though the best way to tackle the “RAT MENACE” is to install Airtight Aluminum Silos across the country, it is simply impossible to install silos across the country in the storehouses of individual farmers and it is equally impossible for government organizations to install large scale vertical silos to store the over 80 Million Metric ton of grains that they are in charge of overnight.

“The current capacity to store grains in silos is simply insufficient, so much so that at the time of BUMPER-HARVEST we have to store grains on the roads. ”
-Mr. J.P.S. Randhawa, General Manager, Punjab Mandi Board

To strive to solve the “RAT MENACE” whilst keeping in mind the limitations of present solutions we ventured into a project to genetically engineer yeast (Saccharomyces cerevisiae) to reproduce a pathway present in the cat's (Felis catus) kidney and synthetically produce a cat pheromone precursor, namely Felinine. Since, it is proven that rats possess an innate fear response to this compound even in trace concentrations, we decide to use this approach to develop a rat deterrent which would serve our purpose and alleviate post harvest losses faced by the farmers of our country. But we didn’t stop there! We knew that the hallmark of a true societal venture is the ability to convert a “Project into a Product”. To this end we decide to develop the following:

RATTEL

TOMCAT

BIOREACTOR

RATTEL-RAT Timidity tester from Evidence based Learning

In order to get the maximum output from minimum input we integrated a new facet to our Product Design and created a software for the most effective deployment of TOMCAT. This led to the development of RATTEL, a software based on Active Brownian Dynamics designed to study the spatio-temporal dynamics of murines exposed to Pheromone based on experimental parameters and field data. This is used to predict the best location for device deployment, given possible points of entry of murines, environmental factors, and the configuration of placed stored grains, such that the aversion response seen in the murines is the maximum.

A user of TOMCAT can easily use this software, and rest assured that the location at which TOMCAT is deployed is the most efficient for that particular environment.

TOMCAT -Topologically OptiMized Click Activated Tool

In order to deploy our Genetically Modified Organism (GMO), we had to make sure that our product was robust enough to be deployed in the granaries of farmers, have a reasonable shelf life, and be secure enough not to allow any GMO to escape.

This led to the development of TOMCAT and TOMCAT+

Two 3D printed yeast incubating modules, containing highly nutritious media in the form of a hydrogel and our GMO in spore form in a sealed chamber on the inner walls of the device. The device contains another secondary chamber containing the lysis media. A novel feature in our device is that the spores can stay in the sealed chamber in their dormant state for a very long time, and can be spread on top of the media at any time following a simple click mechanism.

Steps to use TOMCAT:

Note: Further, optimization will be carried out to increase the period over which TOMCAT produces FearOmone.

Note: The minimum period after which the second button must be clicked is 2 days, so that the yeast reaches the stationary phase of its life cycle where the production of the secondary metabolites like Felinine would be at their maximum.

Steps to use TOMCAT+:

BIOREACTOR - For large-scale production of Felinine

“The only way to turn a project into a product is to industrialize it!”

Since we wanted to create an impact on as many stakeholders as possible, we had to extend our Product Design so that it may smoothly be integrated in the organizational framework of the Large Storehouse, where the chief method for avoiding rat infestation was to fumigate the grains with chemical sprays.

The sprays used by the big corporations are toxic nature, but if we were to mass produce a naturally occurring pheromone, it would not only ensure complete eradication of the “RAT MENACE” from the Large Granaries, but will also ensure absolutely no deterioration of the grain quality.

Since, the method of deployment is the same as the one employed by Food Corporation of India (FCI) workers, our Product Design can be smoothly integrated with the present strategies without any demand for new resources.

The BIOREACTOR uses a regular supply of nutrients and works in a Batch-cum-Continuous manner to produce Felinine in large quantities. This can be deployed in High-Pressure Sprays and also be stored in hydrogels, which would allow for the slow release of FearOmone from the hydrogel, making sure that FearOmone stays in the environment for a long time.

We knew we had the wheels rolling and were heading for an economically, socially, and environmentally responsible product, but we wanted to understand what our final product represented to our stakeholders. We were always in constant touch with our stakeholders but since we had one idea deployed in 3 smart ways catering to all our stakeholders, any real understanding about how our product would impact lives would have to come from the discussion and deliberation of all our stakeholders and that is exactly what we did!

STAKEHOLDERS INVOLVED IN POST-HARVEST LOSSES MEETUP:

The Stakeholders' meetup allowed the fusion and intermixing of opinions ranging from the farmer, to the General Manager of the Punjab Mandi Board, to the Regional Head of the FCI. We understood that there was a genuine demand for a solution like ours and therefore it possessed the potential to create an impact in our everyday lives. We were made to understand that there exists cases where there is a surplus of grains, especially at the peak time of harvest in May, and in cases of “BUMPER-HARVESTS” where the grain storage capacity of all the store houses get exhausted.

This results in storehouses Being forced to leave the grains in unscientific warehouses and even in the open. In these cases, it becomes extremely important to protect the grains from rodent infestation and that is exactly where TOMCAT comes out to play. Our stakeholders raised their concern that in the situations where TOMCAT is kept in the open, windy conditions, its effect would drastically reduce, which we believe is a genuine concern to tackle. Therefore, we plan to target the use of TOMCAT in the temporary shelters used by the large corporation at the time of surplus grain hold and in farmers' individual grain reserves. We wish to implement the industrial scale BioReactor to mass-produce our genetic engineering product and circulate it in the form of Spray tanks to smoothly and gradually replace environmentally harmful Chemical Sprays.

Reference:

  1. The above Design Thinking Principle, to start from “What is?” to “What works?” is based on the course “Design Thinking for Innovation” offered at the University of Virginia,USA.

  2. https://epicureandculture.com/karni-mata-temple/

  3. In 2008, after assessing human health and ecological effects, as well as benefits,[6] the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced measures to reduce risks associated with ten rodenticides “

  4. Rodent Control Pesticide Safety Review. https://www.epa.gov/rodenticides/rodent-control-pesticide-safety-review