Fixation

We discussed with Professor Zeng Fansuo. When we wanted to choose a chemical agent to induce the expression of Bax (BCL2 Associated X, Apoptosis Regulator) gene, Professor Zeng suggested that we could use the α-factor to induce the pFig2c promoter to initiate the expression of Bax suicide gene. In this case, α-type yeast can naturally produce α-factor, which can be recognized by a-type yeast to induce the pFig2c promoter.

Advantages

Because we have taken into account the interception of information during message transmission, spy yeast (a-type yeast) can be induced to trigger apoptosis by the α factor of the killer yeast (α-type yeast) in the process of complete cultivation. The limited culturing time of the yeast prior to their death can prevent information from being leaked out. When designated receiver gets the information-carrying yeast and culture it properly, the yeast can successfully survive. When we discussed these questions with Professor Niu Ben, he suggested that we can use introns that can be spliced out during mRNA maturation to further encrypt our information.

Applications

Through communication with experts from the National Secrecy Bureau of Heilongjiang Province in China, we learned that if our system can be used in the encryption industry, we should be as rigorous as possible in our biological principles. We must limit the equipment and personnel access scopes to ensure that the entire encryption process is rigorous enough. For example, the transport of information-carrying yeast powder and the storage of the keys should be the responsibility of different people, and each part should be accessible to a limited number of people.

Outreach

One of the best ways to increase scientific awareness is communication by which people who do not have theoretical knowledge will well understand complex research.

In the game, we simulate the processes of receiving information, interpreting the information, stealing the information and deciphering the information. The players can realize the strong confidentiality of our system and the necessity of its existence.

Additionally, in the game we also designed a section to emphasize the biological origin of our system, in which we used simple animations to explain details of the biological principles of our case to help people understand our project.

Player self-report

Player Yang
As a student who is not major in biology, synthetic biology is so far for me, but this mini-game opens the door to a new world for me. I never thought that biological knowledge could be applied in information storage and encryptions, this mini-game really helped me learn a lot.

Player Wang
I found that if I were a burglar who wanted to get true information without correct primers, I had to go through a lot of trials, which shows that this encryption system has stronger confidentiality than the existing encryption methods.

Player Zhang
This game is very interesting, and the biological knowledge involved is also refreshing, but I think that if we finally get the sentence that there is blank instead of a string of letters, it may be more convenient for the recipient.
Through the player's self-report, we know that our small game really allows players to learn the biological knowledge of our project, and experience the difficulties of cracking our system. At the same time, their suggestions also let us know the shortcomings of our case. We will use computer programming to improve our password book to achieve the effect of word segmentation.

Social

Our project is about the storage, encryption and transportation of information, so we decided to interview relevant experts and potential users for their advice to optimize our project.

National Institutions
The National Secrecy Bureau of Heilongjiang Province in China

We got in touch with the National Secrecy Bureau of Heilongjiang Province in China to understand the bottlenecks and challenges encountered by today's information storage encryption systems to optimize our project.

First of all, we explained to the experts the principles and innovations of our case, and put forward an issue: how can we avoid violent cracking?

Experts’ advice:

1.Violent cracking is unavoidable, so worry is unnecessary.
2.Do physical isolation to avoid any possible actions that may divulge secret information in the encryption process.
3. Rights Management. We can authorize the staffs in an organization with different levels of access permissions.
4. Maintain an excellent routine record. We need to record the times and purposes of all usage.
Through the communication with experts, we know that if our system is really going to be used in this field, we not only need to be as rigorous as possible in our biological principles, but also need to limit the equipment and personnel settings to ensure the whole process is rigorous enough.

Society
Survey

In order to make future potential users truly accept and willing to use our system, we need to know their opinions, so we conducted surveys in the form of a questionnaire of people from different occupations and different educational level in the society.
The surveys are mainly based on the following aspects:
1. Public knowledge of information encryption storage.
2. Public perception on information interception.
3. Public perception on our encryption system.
In order to make our findings more accurate, we planned to increase the number of people with higher education levels.
The results are shown below:

Here are the types of people surveyed by us.

From the results of these surveys, we have come to the following conclusion:
Most people did not know much about encryption of information storage, but they were mostly used to encrypting their own information.
At the same time, we introduced them to our project and explained the advantages of our system compared to the other encryption methods.

We obtained the following results:

The diagram shows that most people supported our project, but only a few people were willing to try our system. In our further inquiries, 76% people indicated that they worried about the usage of GMOs （Genetically Modified Organisms) in our project, so we decided to take some other measures to publicize our project, in order to persuade people to accept our system.