Team:Rheda Bielefeld/Human Practices
Human practices
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
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
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.
Team Rheda_Bielefeld at the Marta Museum of Modern Arts
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.
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.
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.