Difference between revisions of "Team:Rheda Bielefeld/Human Practices"

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<h2> Team Rheda_Bielefeld at the Marta Museum of Modern Arts </h2>
 
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On September 16 of this year, Leon and Ben represented our Team at the Marta
 
Museum of Modern Arts in Herford, Germany. Topic of the exhibition which took
 
place on this date was “Creatures made to measure”. Many visitors from all over
 
Germany had been part of a tour over the weekend, and this tour ended in the
 
museum. There were many interesting pieces of art to see, the pieces went from
 
classic sculptures made of marble to very extraordinary short movies and paintings.
 
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As the exhibition was about creating figures of living being, our team, in course of a
 
collaboration with the team of Bielefeld_CeBiTec, we had a stand where we showed
 
the visitors how to extract DNA out of pepper.
 
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The Experiment required some home remedies: mortar and tappet, glasses,
 
pepper, salt, water, dish soap, pineapple juice, a sieve and pure alcohol.
 
First you crush 2 pieces of paprika together with a tea spoon of salt in a mortar
 
followed by mixing it with 100ml of water. Then you leach this mixture with a sieve
 
and pour it into a glass with two tea spoons of dish soap. After waiting 5 to 10
 
minutes, you pour pineapple juice to the filtrate and stir it. Now you have to tilt the
 
glass a bit so that you hold it diagonally and then you pour the pure alcohol in it.
 
After a couple of minutes you can hopefully see a white fade in the substance.
 
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Since synthetic biology is about solving problems and creating solutions via genetic
 
engineering with organisms and organic material, we wanted to show the people
 
the opportunities and possibilities of genetic engineering. To make the people
 
getting interested in our project, we linked them in into a small experiment.
 
Extracting DNA out of pepper using pineapple juice, salt and straws is quite fun and
 
also possible to repeat at home, so the visitors will remember that synthetic biology
 
 
  
is not just a complex field of science only taking part in high security labs, but can
 
also be very simple and even funny. While telling the visitors about our project, we
 
saw that people unfortunately had a strange image of genetic technologies in their
 
mind, like creating evil diseases or mutated rats for secret government operations
 
by changing and editing the genes of organisms, but we showed them that
 
synthetic biology is not the tool of the evil, but the key to a brighter future for
 
humanity.
 
  
 
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Revision as of 13:53, 15 October 2018




Human practices

After we thought about our project we wanted to know if it could be established or more specifically if it is an idea that is profitable .

To be on the safe side with our project we contacted many experts and explained them our intention. We contacted not only allergists to check if our test strip, that will identify the different pollen in the air, can help to to measure out the medicine, but also scientists who are specialized in palynology ( scientific field of pollen) and the German fruit juice industry, because our Escherichiacoli will produce pectinase, which is often used by the industry for breaking the cells of fruits in order to gain as much juice as possible.

Asking allergists and professors

Another part of our Human Practise was contacting some allergists to figure out the negative impact and side effects of antihistamines which are tiring but the allergy itself lowers the capability of the affected persons . Therefor e we approached Stefani Röseler who works at the university hospital of Aachen in the otorhinolaryngology and allergology. She told us about a study at a British school . The res ult of the study was that during the seasons where a lot of pollen are in the air and the students take anti allergenics, there grades differ negatively up to a whole grade ( Walker, S., Khan-Wasti, S., Fletscher, M., Cullinan, P., Harris, J., Sheikh, A.: “Seasonal allergic rhinitis is associated with a detrimental effect on examination performance in United Kingdom teenagers: Case control study”, in Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology 2007: 120, 2: 381-387 ). So, the capability of the students performance suffers from the medicine and another side effect is fatigue .
Jereon Buters, a professor at the technical university of Munich showed real interest in our general project. After the Giant Jamboree we want to stay in contact with him and he wants to support our project in future researches.
Another thing we had to think about was the negative side of developing a biosensor. If the biosensor debuts, the centre for pollen in the technical university of Munich which counted the pollen before would lose their purpose and it could cause loss of jobs because the pollen were counted by hand with a microscope.

Asking the fruit juice industry

We communicated with the executive secretary of the German association for the fruit juice industry („Verband der deutschen Fruchtsaft-Industrie“), Klaus Heitlinger.
He told us that the fruit juice industry uses pectinase for clearing the juice, which is an important step for clear apple juice. If our E. coli could produce the pectinases, it could be used in the fruit juice industry because the amount of pectinase the industry need is „quantum satis“(limit l ess).
I f there is a chance for the fruit juice industry to use the E. coli it needs to be approved for the food production by the European Union that tests the E.coli if it is detrimental to ones health and if it can be used by the for industry.
So this could be another way to use our E. coli and to research in the future.