Difference between revisions of "Team:TecMonterrey GDL/Human Practices"

Insights: Not responsible. We thought that our product could be made working alone with E. coli, without considering the adverse effects that this could cause in people.

Changes:It was considered to test the strategy first in E. coli and later pass it to L. rhamnosus, a microorganism better accepted by humans.

Resume:

Our team went to the company Kurago Biotek, experts in cultures of beneficial and active living microorganisms along with nutrients, to talk with them and receive feedback on the initial strategy that we thought to carry out, which was to use E. coli bacteria for realization of our psychobiotic. The company advised us to use a well-known probiotic, such as L. rhamnosus, since its benefits have been well studied and its good acceptance by the human body is known. On the other hand, they advised us to use E. coli only to test our work before passing it on to L. rhamnosus since it would be easier to test its functioning first in E. coli.

Insights: Target. The panel helped us identify new groups of people vulnerable to these diseases, we adapted our product and market studies according to the new information recollected.

Changes:The community presented more interest not only on the topic, but in our project.

Resume:

The team decided to invite three expert psychologists in education, systemic family therapy and student affairs to a panel that aimed to talk about depression from an integral angle to the students, teachers and parents of our university. The event was held in the congress center of our university and was planned based on the idea of a coffee talk. At the beginning of the event the project of our team was presented and a brief introduction of the event was given to put in context those present. Subsequently, the experts talked about definitions, myths, truths and situations in particular of depression and anxiety. Finally, there was a time for attendees to express their doubts or share their experiences. From this event, we realized that depression not only affects people with low economic resources, who have had some loss or suffer from another serious illness, but that all those exposed to stress become vulnerable to develop a disorder depressed or anxious, like students. This helped us along with our market studies to define the audience to which our product would be directed.

Insights: Appeal. We thought that they wouldn’t be interested on the topics.

Changes:We learned that science is more present in our community than what we thought.

Resume:

Our team made a presentation with basic concepts from biology, microbiology, biotechnology, sustainable development, industry, applications of biotechnology, its origins and examples in our daily basis. We contacted a secondary school called: “Escuela Secundaria José Arreola”; the administratives of the school allowed us to give the informative activity to third and second grades alumni. The school has two schedules, it has different groups in the morning and in the afternoon, we attended both turns. After the chat was finished we proceeded organize a jeopardy for the teenagers to play, we divided the alumni into four groups, we gave each group a chance to pick a category: biotechnology, microbiology & biology, daily life and sustainable development. At the very end, we awarded the teams with candies equivalent to the points they had earned. We received a very positive response from the students, and the director invited us to return in the next school period.

Insights: Constructive criticism. Exchange experience with other teams.

Changes:We had to rethink our strategy of communication of the project and study more about the topic.

Resume:

Our team attended the event organized by our university but on another campus, to present our project to teachers who gave us feedback. This gave us the opportunity to know the projects of other Latin American teams and at the same time to know our areas of opportunity for improvement based on the criticism and observations of the judges. The judges made us reconsider the side effects of our product and how we could do to prevent them from being negative.

Insights: Response. Gut-on-a-chip will provide a secure way to know Lactobachill has the desired effect.

Changes:The way to test our L. rhamnosus construct.

Resume:

Our University will work in collaboration with the Northeastern University through Dr. Rebecca Carrier, a professor of chemical engineering, who will collaborate with our team to specifically assist in the introduction of our Lactobachill product in a gut-on-a-chip system with the intention of characterize how the product interacts with said system and especially how it modulates the immune response in a competent immune model.

Insights: Improvement. To clear the doubts that emerge during the realization of the project

Changes:New perspective of the project.

Resume:

The team decided to interview another psychologist, to upload videos of segments of the interview to our social networks and in that way share it with our followers and general public. Also, in addition to asking about common things about depression and anxiety disorders, we decided to ask about things that have to do with the neurological aspect of mental illnesses, as well as their most common treatments through drugs and adverse effects.

Insights: Intimate. The public is excited to live more closely cases of depression and anxiety of people who have already gone through it and overcome it willing to share it.

Changes:We consider listening more closely to those suffering from depression or anxiety to know more about the needs that our project must cover in its entirety.

Resume:

The living library is way of showing those who might be scared to share with others that they are depressed or even as encouraging them to accept their disease. This is a powerful of way of demonstrating the community that depression and anxiety are common diseases and that we must not be ashamed of suffering these illnesses thus we expect to create a digital space where people who go to this experience are comfortable enough to seek help and raise their voice.

Also there are still some people who believe that depression is just something that happens in movies, so via this experience we want to prove the relevance of mental health.

Insights: Excitement, sharing our work and learn from the work of other is awesome.

Changes:Seek counseling help with other teams and advise other teams as well.

Resume:

We are really excited to collaborate with other iGem teams around the world; we developed a dynamic where we asked other teams to take a photograph of a touristic monument and add an special hashtag.

We also collaborated with iGem teams, like TEC CEM 2018, NYU Abu Dhabi, Endophyte Club, Bulgaria 2018, Team ICT Mumbai, iGEM Bordeaux, iGEM Toronto, Team Stony Brook, Team UChile_Biotec, iGEM Thessaloniki, IIT Kanpur, Bielefeld 2018, iGEM SKLMT-China, iGEM team UC San Diego - epinoma, CUNY Kingsborough.