Integrated HP

Integrated Human Practices

Rome was not built in a day, so as the establishment of our system. Step by step, we improved it in the process of thinking about how to better deal with the problem of eutrophication caused by excessive phosphorus in environmental waters. Finally, we discovered that the system we built can be applied to the processing of other elements. In the process, some HP plays a decisive role. In the integrated HP category, we will show how these HPs directly influence the direction of our project design—the impact of society and the environment on our projects.

Our general design step(click the button to see details):

The first two steps are directly determined and changed by HP, and the latter design is also completed with the help of some HP.

1.Candlelight navigation—— communicate with professor like a friend

The motivation of our project came from a conversation between a professor and some of our team members. In Wuhan University, “Candlelight navigation” is an opportunity for students to directly communicate with professors and get instruction ranging from life to academy. By this chance, we had an unforgettable conversation with Professor Xin Lu who majored in bird ecology. He stressed the importance of environmental protection for many times:” The water of the East Lake used to be so clear that there were always many teachers and students swimming in it… However, because of the deterioration of the ecological environment and excessive sewage discharge, the East Lake was once covered with a layer of horrible green film. From then on, we have no longer seen anyone swimming in the lake…”

Since then, these words has been lingering in our minds. After a year, five people from that conversation joined iGEM. The purpose of the competition was to make the world a better place. At that time, we set the initial blueprint for our project.

East Lake is the second biggest lake in the city in China and Wuhan University is located on the shore of it. Therefore, it is convenient for us to see it, the once beautiful East Lake. . .

Eutrophication is a big problem in China, In the past few decades, many beautiful rivers and lakes have become no longer clear due to eutrophication, and the delicate ecosystem has been destroyed. East Lake is one of them…

In the following year, we have been thinking about how to solve the problem of eutrophication more effectively., and we determined our project – phosphorus accumulation, the content of phosphorus is the key to eutrophication. At the same time, we consider that the general phosphorus removal process is to directly fill the sludge containing phosphorus, because it is impossible to achieve "bacteria phosphorus separation". the release of phosphorus is introduced to our design, so that the phosphorus collected from the environment can be controlled by people and released as resources for reuse. It is a resource-friendly environmental treatment.

2. Breakthrough——collaborate with IHB CAS

After we discussed our thoughts with the professor Mao in the collage of Resources and Environment, he gave us some advice: If you want your ideas to become reality, you must consider the survival of the bacteria when they are exposed to contaminated water. We have not done so much thinking about the resistance of bacteria before.

Then, we have consulted a lot of academic literature, and we found that it takes plenty of energy for bacteria to recycle phosphorus since this process involves Poly P dynamics. We also found that some environmental factors such as nitrogen content will not only affect the growth of bacteria, but also the efficiency of phosphorus accumulation.

We came across a big problem therefore because we can’t solve these problems by just adding a few pathways.

Finally we went to the Institute of Hydrobiology, Chinese Academy of Sciences for help, R. Xuezhi Zhang introduced us a very advanced methods to treat the sewage—the symbiotic system of bacteria and algae! He also introduced us a symbiotic biofilm system, which is so helpful for our design and project improvement.

The symbiotic system can greatly improve the resistance of bacteria and the algae can reduce nitrogen content in water. The EPS (extracellular poly substances) can trap almost all kinds of harmful chemical agents. Furthermore, algae can provide bacteria energy through photosynthesis. The problems that troubled us can be completely solved by introducing a symbiotic system, and even make it better!

After that, we improve our project and carefully re-design the whole system!

Our laboratory conditions were not sufficient to culture and monitor algae. Fortunately, we have cooperated with the Aquatic Institute and we sent a group of our team member to the Aquatic institute to complete the experiment of symbiotic and biofilm formation with the guidance of teachers!

3. Visit Bluepha！

During the communication with Bluepha, alumnus Boxiang Wang affirmed our project and gave us lots of suggestions. We talked about our project in detail. The most troublesome thing for us at the time was the search for optical switches. He recommended two valuable documents for us. Finally, we decided to use CcaS/R optical switch system and this system works well in our experiments!

He also gave us a follow-up experiment grouping and expanded recommendations, which were helpful.

4. XSH Water Co., Ltd.

We visited XSH Water Co., Ltd. to learn more about how the real factory works. The manager Zhang gave us a detailed introduction about the overall process of sewage disposal. He took us to the sewage treatment tank and showed us the drug add-on room as well as some laboratories equipped with sewage plants. We talked about our project and he thought our design was very creative——instead of controlling the sewage discharge, active remediation of environment is more direct. In addition, the idea of changing pollutant back to resource is very effective and exciting.