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Revision as of 12:31, 16 October 2018
Pictures:
How to use a Interpollen Teststripe if construction was finished
Our Project
As generally known, pollen is a farinaceous substance consisting of pollen cores and made in the stamens of plants. In the time of late February and August, pollens are spread in the air wherever trees, grasses, and plants grow and bloom. This has both bright and dark sides: pollen make other plants and flowers bloom and fields get colorful, but on the other hand, millions of people suffer from pollen because they are allergic to them. In Germany alone are over 20 million people being allergic to a large number of different substances, for example, dust, hairs of various pets and some sorts of food. Logically it makes sense to avoid those substances- but how to avoid pollen in times where you can find pollen everywhere in the air? To do that, you can do two things: You can either use antiallergic medicine turning down the activity of the immune system and leads to a wide weaker reaction of allergic substances or to just stay at home to prevent you to get a headache or a sniff. But using these medicines make it nearly impossible to go to school or to work and this kind of drugs can be very expensive. From this situation, we hope to start with the idea: a test stripe using methods of genetic analyzing and the assays done in our research which scans the air to detect the current amount of spread pollen in the air. This stripe would show you which sorts of pollens and how much of these are flying.
Since this is our very first project in the iGEM competition, our research started with collecting information about the structure of animal and plant cells and with the construction of E.coli. To work with the genetic material, we also learned to get along with the methods of a PCR and a gel electrophoresis in context to the extraction of DNA. After spending some time into practice, the effort paid off: we were able to extract DNA from pollens. First, after looking at the pollens under the microscope, we tried to break the shell of the pollen core with fluent nitrogen and with pectinase. The shell of pollen consists of pectin, so we searched for methods to decompose pectin. Therefore pectinase, from example from the mushroom Aspergillus niger, can be used. We have fulfilled our research up to this point. We searched for methods of a Pectin Assay and have been successful with decomposing pectin with pectinase.
In fact, a Cellulose Assay is also needed for a complete analysis of the DNA of pollen, but because we were struggling with having too little time, we were unable to actually perform a cellulose assay. Because of this, we will mention the cellulose assay in an article, we will mention how this experiment looks like in theory without actually having made the experience with it.
We have tried to get in touch with various scientists, beekeepers, and various organizations like the German Association of Fruit Juice. Unfortunately, most of them either were not interested in cooperating or were unable to bring our research forwards, but we still got some answers to our requests from some scientists. More information about this topic can be found in our article about Human Practises.
We also participated in the Interlab Study. For more information, read our article about the Interlab Study.
Even though we were unable to start the final construction of the test stripe, we hope that our idea can be used and improved in the near future by scientists or even be continued by another iGEM using our results as a base for their following research. Our greatest hope is that somebody will be able to build the test stripe and the stripe can be sold in public.
