Public Engagemet

We can’t just sit down in the laboratory and do the design and experiments. To know whether our project is really useful and good for the world, we must enter the society. There are many questions can be asked. For example, is the eutrophication problem really that serious? What are the people’s opinions towards eutrophication and pollution in the East Lake? Do they really care about that? How to achieve our design in real world? What are the advantages of our project compared with current methods? Can we apply our system to other fields?

To answer those questions as much as possible, we conduct a series of public engagement.

East Lake HP set

We put these 4 HP activities in this HP set, from the input survey (quality test of East Lake and Questionnaire and interview) to output community lecture, a HP set is a complete logic chain.

1.1 East Lake Water Quality Test

In order to take a deep understanding of the environmental problem of the East Lake, especially the eutrophication, which is attributed to phosphorus content, we sampled from three different positions of the East Lake, and measured the OD value after using the total phosphorus content measurement kit. After that, we compared it with prepared standard curve to measure the total phosphorus content of East Lake.

number	result（OD（700nm））			average	P concentration mg/L
1	0.069	0.063	0.072	0.068	0.79
2	0.107	0.109	0.105	0.107	1.23
3	0.097	0.097	0.096	0.097	1.17

According to Vollenweider's classification criteria for reservoir lake nutrition status, the water quality of East Lake exceeded 7 to 10 times of the standard criteria.

1.2 Questionnaire and interview

In order to know people’s understanding of the eutrophication pollution of the East Lake to make our project more realistic, we did some survey activities. We designed an electronic questionnaire and distributed it in Wuhan University, Xincun Street, East Lake community and the sewage treatment plant. In the end, 85 questionnaires were collected. We processed the data and the result is as follows:

We can see from the result that most people are aware of the pollution of the East Lake. eutrophication is a very common form of water pollution. However, this basic knowledge remained unknown to many people, such as the indicators of eutrophication and water eutrophication treatment. This indicated that most people understand that the water quality of East Lake has certain problems, but the details were scarcely known. This made us determine to do more public education related to water pollution.

1.3 community lecture

In order to introduce pollution situation of the East Lake water quality to community and spread the idea of synthetic biology, we contacted with the local community and organized “WHU-iGEM come to the community, synthetic biology science activities”.

We introduced GMO, synthetic biology, and the pollution situation of the East Lake water quality to community. Meanwhile, the contents of our project was also included. Not only do we promoted synthetic biology, but also brought some science knowledge and technology to the residents, which enhanced the scientific awareness of them. Finally, this activity achieved great result.

2. Synthetic biology enters the classroom

In April 2018, we carried out the "Synthetic Biology Science Lecture, Microbial Plate Graffiti Competition", and did propaganda and education work. We guided them to understand the concept of engineering bacteria. To make the learning process fun, we organized a microbial flat-grain graffiti competition by using engineered E. coli as painting material. This activity gave us the opportunity to educate children about synthetic biology and introduce iGEM.

3. X S H Water Co., Ltd.

We reviewed many current methods of sewage treatment and environmental remediation online to compare our method with current methods. However, it was not enough. For a deeper understanding, 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.