Team:NTNU Trondheim/Human Practices

Human practices allowed us to reach out to our community and increase awareness of the various problems caused by biofilm.

We chose our project with the idea of combating antibiotic resistance. It has been well documented that bacteria found in biofilms are more resistant to antibiotic treatment than other bacteria, making them very difficult to get rid of. Having little idea about the impact biofilm has on our society, we decided to investigate further. Initially we wanted to find one area of application, but at the beginning we were not aware of the broadness of issues caused by biofilm. After doing several interviews we decided that the purpose of our project is to prove a principal and to address the broad variety of issues that needs individual solutions. This is important when assessing the delivery method for our CRISPR-system. This way we got an idea about the applicability of our system and which considerations that have to be made related to the individual problems.

We also spoke with experts for advice regarding our lab procedures, as we were uncertain of which aspects to focus on regarding biofilm formation. We wanted the biofilm assay design to have similar conditions as in nature. The discussions we had are described in the timeline below.

Interactive Timeline

Click on the header of each bullet point to read more about how this interaction contributed to our project

Each person has a gold or silver medal based on how which criteria they contributed to. A gold medal indicates that they contributed to the Gold criteria of Integrated Human Practices, while a silver medal indicated they contributed to the Silver criteria.

For each interview, you can read a short list of the key aspects of how this person contributed to Integrated Human Practices, a short list of key insights from the interview, and at last, a summary of the interview as a whole.

Conclusion

The human practices part of our project provided us with a lot of new knowledge and ideas that we applied to our project. More importantly, it allowed us to come into contact with our community and increase both our and public awareness on the various problems caused by biofilm-producing bacteria.

The main idea at the start of our project was to reduce biofilm formation in bacteria and thus make them more susceptible to antibiotics. During the course of the Human Practices part of our project we learned a great deal about other areas in need of an effective biofilm reducing method, such as dental care, diabetes, prostheses surgery, diagnostics and aquaculture. A variety of treatments for biofilm are available as of today, however they all seem to have their limitations. Our approach to biofilm removal is unique in that bacteriophages have an ability to evolve, meaning that bacteria most likely wouldn’t be able to develop resistance for a long time. If successful, our method could be a potential breakthrough in the field of biofilm-reducing agents.

We want to thank all the experts for taking the time to talk with us. Their perspectives opened up our eyes for a whole new world of biofilm-related problems that we had no idea about prior to our project. We also got quite a few useful tips that we implemented in our lab procedures, such as the use of Crystal Violet Assay for biofilm quantification.