Difference between revisions of "Team:Valencia UPV/Integrated Human"

Kano Model

Kano model is used to understand the importance of functions or features to a customer [1]. We have used it to improve Printeria and we want it to be a guide for future iGEM teams, thats why we are going to present our work as a example of use.

Kano model is made up of three stages:

1. Pick up the user's voice

   In this phase you have present your project to an audience and then you ask for criticisms or improvements. We did it in the Mustang Art Gallety (MAG) in Elche (Alicante). At the end of the demostration we gathered all the students and teachers and we asked them for demands, improvements or criticisms.

2. Create your paired questions quiz

   With those demands that we will call necessities you have to make a cuestionaire based on paired cuestions. This questions have the next grammar: ¿How do you feel if (a necessity exists in your device)? and ¿How do you feel if (that necessity did no existed in your device)?. As you can observe, it is the same necessity but expresed positively or negatively. Check aout our questionnaire to see an example:

   CUESTIONNAIRE

3. Clasify your demands

   Once you have all the asnwers, you have to complete a series of tables to conclude if that necessity is really important or not. If it is, you should include it in your design because that will increase the satisfaction of the user. If it is not, do not waste time and money implementing something no one will appreciate!

Study case: Kano model in Printeria

When using Kano model you can join public engagement with integrated human. Taking advantage of the fact that we went to MAG (Mustang Art Gallery) in Elche (Alicante) to present our project in front of students and teachers, we decided to demand feedback. The most important necessities were included in the cuestionaire we described above, and then we send it to the students and teachers who went to fill it. The cuestionnaire and the results are avaliable by clicking in the botton "cuestionnaire".

Once we had the answers (more than 20 to be representative), we filled the different tables Kano model is composed to obtain the results desired. Here you can download the document with the tables and what is most important, the conclusions extracted:

Overall conclusions

Last but not least, a table summing why Kano model is important and should be implemented in future iGEM projects.

Table 1. Conclusions of Kano model use in Printeria.

Kano model is an strong tool to include feedback in your project

Kano model rank needs by customer/user satisfaction

Kano model prevents wasting money and time implementing unnecesary needs

Kano model allows you to join public engagement and integrated practices

Kano model allows you to explain why something was designed or not

Expert feedback

A very good way to enrich the project through feed-back is to do so by consulting experts in the field of study as has been done previously in iGEM. Their opinion is really relevant because of the reputation that precedes them, and that adds value to the product/project.

That is why we have decided to contact renowned artists and sciencists from the world of bioart and biotecnology to present them our project and seek advice. Next section describes who we have reached out and how their opinions have changed Printeria.

María Peñil & Mehmet Berkmen

María Peñil Cobo is a Spanish mixed media artist born in San Vicente de la Barquera. She studied fine arts and has a master in art education. To do her masterpieces she works with natural media like bacteria.

Dr. Mehmet Berkmen is a Turkish-born international microbiologist. Nowadays he is a Senior sciencist at NEB working on genetically engineering bacteria to produce proteins.

As you can see above María Peñil and Mehmet Berkmen are coworkers in NEB Biolabs Boston. Together, they are dedicated to making bioart with bacteria grown in agar, which fascinated us. They are what printeria represents, art and science connected, so we wanted to contact them and expose our project as well as ask for advice. The results of the interview can be seen in this document:

Interview conclusions were:

• It is difficult for artists to get in touch with scientists. Maria and Memo met by coincidence.

  In this aspect, Printeria can be thought as a way to approach artists to scientists and vice versa.

• Preservation of bioart plates is one of the biggest problems. The best way to preserve them is leaving the plates in the fridge. But using epoxy or other resins can help preservation.

  We left our best plates on the fridge and we tried to fix them by using transparent nail polish as a cheap epoxy with really good results.

• Consider working by layers when working with different types of bacteria. The low growers should go first and after growing them, fast growers should be added.

  As we are only working with E. coli, we are having no problems. But this piece of advice should be taken into account if Printeria ends up using other different chassis than just E. coli strains.

• They don’t create their own GM microorganisms, so they think Printeria could be a useful machine to do so. Memo encourages us to do a manuscript out of this, even if the machine does not totally work. This could make people start using it so that Printeria could evolve.

  The idea of doing a manuscript caught our eyes and we are planning to do so. It also made us think about creating the ‘Printeria user manual’ as well as an activity booklet for the user to learn even more about SynBio.

• Do not only focus on creating colourful bacteria but on stand-alone scent pathways.

  We achieved to create mint scented E. coli but we will continue doing some research in stand-alone scent pathways.

• For doing bioart, just try different techniques: using glass beads, pipetting liquid cultures, using sowing handles.

  We knew nothing about bioart and, thanks to Maria and Memo, we started developing our skills to quickly learn the basics about this type of art. We used the pipetting method to create Yturralde’s living art and the sowing handles for creating Printeria’s logo and for letting students create their own masterpieces in MAG.

• Memo thinks Printeria is a nice multidisciplinary project. He encourages us to show who we are, and the way we learnt to speak a common language in which biotechnologists, engineers, designers and informatics, understood each other.

  It is very important for people to know that Printeria is more than just a biotechnological project. It is a machine in which lots of different disciplines worked together with a single goal. And this piece of advice really helped us while creating our poster and while planning our Giant Jamboree’s presentation.

• It could be graeat if people could touch Printeria. Take it to Boston and try to do a live performance during the Jamboree. This will influence the judges a lot.

  Printeria's final prototype was built to be as easy as a lego toy, so that anyone can assemble it. This fact will make Printeria perfect to travel to Boston and, of course, to perform public demonstrations there.

Francis Mojica

Dr. Francisco Juan Martínez Mojicais a microbiologist, researcher and professor at the University of Alicante. He is the discoverer of the CRISPR-Cas systems whose application would later be researched by Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna among others.

In Spain, he is one of the most reputable researchers and as such, his opinion and advice are worth their price in gold. Mojica accepted our invitation for a personal interview in which we would present the project and ask her for advice. The interview was carried out by Carolina Ropero, member of the Printeria team. In the following button you will be able to read the whole interview:

Interview conclusions were:

• Mojica agrees that with Printeria the automation decreases the experimental error. However, he warned us about the importance of being aware of the decisions to make, even if a device such Printeria is able to do all the process by itself.

  To avoid the user lack of awareness, we decided to develop a Simulation tool, so the user could simulate the experiments in silico. Thus, this functionality provides the user with a quantitative, mathematical description to ensure the rational decision making.

• He believes that, from the education point of view, the automatizing is detrimental to the observation. He also pointed out the necessity of forming the teaching stuff, as they are not often used to SynBio.

  In order to ensure the students understanding of the biology that is upon each step, we decided to develope a Printeria basic user-guide. Moreover, we implemented recipes in our software tool. Recipes are already pre-defined experiments that include an easy ID name such as “pink colour”, so in this way the most basic user can understand what ishe/she printing and so the biological reason of the final result.

• Sterility measures are completely necessary to ensure Printeria introduction in non-scientific environments.

  We realized it was necessary to improve our safety measurements. Mojica advised us the use of UV light filters as bacterial-killer, which were positively integrated into Printeria final design.

• He advised us to be aware about the vocabulary used to divulgue science, as it needs to be technically correct but close and safe enough for the lay public to listen to you.

  This, along with the bioartist expert feedback, gave us the idea to use a non-usual approach to divulgue SynBio into the lay-public. As a consequence, Printeria promotion among society was carried out by including the BioArt as the main attraction to get to the public.

José María Yturralde

Yturralde has a bachelor's degree and a doctorate in fine arts awarded by the Politechnic University of Valencia (UPV).Futhermore he has been researcher in MIT among other great things. Between 1968 and 1973 he developed his work "Impossible figures". These figures are really interesting because they show us how our space perception works, they seem coherent at first glance but when you observe them in more detail you see there are inconsistent details.

To prove Printerias power in bioart we decided to do one of those figures (which you can see in Public engagement) website and an interview to get some expert feedback from him. Here you can see the full interview we did:

Interview conclusions were:

• Conclusion 1 (algo breve tipo: NO usar Vibrio en Printeria) + Explicación de como se ha integrado en Printeria : Nos advirtio de esto porque tacatá y entonces hemos implementado en Printeria esto.

• Conclusion 1 (algo breve tipo: NO usar Vibrio en Printeria) + Explicación de como se ha integrado en Printeria : Nos advirtio de esto porque tacatá y entonces hemos implementado en Printeria esto.

• Conclusion 1 (algo breve tipo: NO usar Vibrio en Printeria) + Explicación de como se ha integrado en Printeria : Nos advirtio de esto porque tacatá y entonces hemos implementado en Printeria esto.

Ryan Fobel

Ryan Fobel is CEO of Sci-Botslocated in Toronto (Canada). He is also doctor of philosophy and medical biophysics.

We e-mailed Ryan to get in contact with a business that actually does Digital Microfluidics and learned a lot from the variables involved into this technology. Our final design was heavily influenced by our conversation via Skype with him. We even got a chance at using some of the Digital Microfluidics Chips that Sci-Bots uses for their machine.

Highlits of design changes:

• Pad distance: It is really important that pads have as little of a distance between them as possible. On our early tests we used around 6 mils of separation between pads. He really advised us to use 4 mils pad separation, and this was implemented on the final PCB for the experimentation surface.

• Surface coating: This is the hardest part to get right. We learned that currently is better to reaply the coating everytime we do a reaction on the surface. To solve this we got inspired on the design by OpenDrop of using disposable surfaces that are held on top of the PCB and we used that concept on the final design of our machine.

Ana & Miriam

Ana Pastor and Miriam are 2 Spanish artists from Alicante, who are really involved in mixing science and art in their pieces of artwork. Ana creates her pieces of art by using her own blood, either lyophilized or even painting with it, while Miriam is working with urban vegetation. So, what will they think about Printeria? Will they find it useful?

Interview conclusions were:

• Science and art should start walking in the same pathway. It is very important for all different disciplines to start hybridizing. Scientists should count a little bit more one creative people to give a fresh and a different point of view.

• Ana is always into trying new things so she would love to use Printeria so that she can experience the idea of working with microorganisms.

• Printeria should think about working out of the petri dish. Not just using colourful bacteria for painting but trying to mix them with different compounds. Or even, in the future, for synthesizing fibres or even textiles out of bacteria.

• Printeria could be sold not as a product for our daily lives but for science schools or even to institutions that do fab lab. So, if anyone wants to use Printeria for an art project, you just go to some of these institutions, you pay a fee and you can use it for a given amount of time.

Safety design

Paris-Bettencourt 2012 team was right when they said in their page "How safe is safe enough?": “Biosafety is an exciting design challenge, an essential enabling technology for synthetic biology, and a fundamental ethical obligation of all bioengineers”.

This sentence describes perfectly what we did with printeria. Printeria was designed to ensure safety for all audiences. In the next table you can se diferent safety problems we saw and how we solved them.

Safety Problem	Solution
Sterilization of the PCB	How do we clean the PCB without damaging the metalic and plastic components. Well, we decided to copy what flow cabins do. Based on this we decided to use UV led lights to achieve this objective. Furthermore we have programmed an especial reaction that use little droplets with HCl and ethanol to clean and ensure we have perfectly sterilized the PCB.
Sterilization of the microfluidic tubes	The reaction fluid is going to pass through microfluidic tubes and it will contaminate them, to reverse this situation we will use the same special program wich usses droplets with ethanol and HCl.
Protection of the user	We want the user to see what is happening inside Printeria but also we want them to be protected if something wrong happens inside. Thats why we thought that a metacrilate box that cover the machines would be a nice option. Besides, it is useful to pin up the elements whicht will be part of Printera.
Overheating of the PCB	As the PCB has a cold and a hot zone, it is necessary to evacuate the heat generated. The hot zone can achieve more than 80º degrees and can be a potencial danger. A resisitance is responsible of heating and a peltier plate is responsible of chilling. Peltier effect is based in a semiconductor metal where you apply a potential difference. Then, you create a hot part and a cold one in that semiconductor. We use the cold part to extract the energy and stabilize the temperature via conduction of the PCB's hot zone.
Ventilation	The peltier plate is responsible of chilling the PCB but ¿How do we evacuate all the energy generated? Well, the answer is simple, Printeria just needed ventilation holes and watercooling to do it. Watercooling is based in the higher termic capacity of fluids (water in this case) to absorb energy. Water is pumped through microfluidic tubes to reach the peltier and chill it.
Electroporator	This device is capable to reach hig voltages, so if you require one of these in your design first of all, ensure no one can harm himself/herself. This is the reason why we designed our own electroporator in a dedicated and compacted printed circuit to isolate it from any exposure. It can reach until 1600V, which is not a joke.
Tips	Tips which go in the revolver wheel are disposable to ensure the purity of each reaction.

A science without ethics is cruel, and an ethics without science is empty. Ethics become really important when a project is being thought. For this reason we wanted to pass the UPV (Universitat Politècnica de València) ethics committee. Here you can download the document we send them to approve and the positive verdict of the committee.