Team:DTU-Denmark/Human Practices
Human Practices
Our team has put a lot of effort into utilizing many different avenues for communicating who we are and what we are doing. Not just have we done multiple educational activities, such as starting the first Danish high school iGEM team, giving talks for 9th graders and advocate for iGEM at a competition for aspiring young students in natural sciences, all of which has a seperate web-page. We have also done a collaboration with the universities of Copenhagen and Exeter to compose a report on the history, ethics and public discourse surrounding Mars colonization.
Furthermore, we hosted a 3-day workshop, the Biobrick tutorial, for more than 40 igem participants from Scandinavian iGEM teams, where performing assembly experiments and exploring the broader possibilities of participating in iGEM were in forefront.
Directly related to our project, we have spoken with from both the industry experts, such as Ecovative and Novozymes, and experts from academia, who have helped shape our ideas and provided valuable feedback to our project. We have also met with another fungal biomaterial project here at DTU to discuss their experiences with growing fungi and how we potentially can help each other moving forward.
Finally, we have worked on reaching out to the broader public be attending a competition in sustainable energies, doing Snapchat takeovers and being showcasing our project during the annual cultural night in Copenhagen.
Integrated Human Practices
To elucidate which direction our project could take, we spoke with experts from both industry and academia. From them, we have gained valuable information on how to conduct our experiments and what to look for.
Meeting with Novozymes
Early in our project we met with Mikako Sasa and Sara Landwik from Novozymes, the world's largest producer of industrial enzymes, to consult experts from the industry. Their advice was to work with either Aspergillus, Schizophyllum or Fusarium. At DTU we already had Aspergillus strains, and we acquired a Schizophyllum strain from Hans Wösten. In addition to knowledge of fungal strains, they shared some ideas on which features could be interesting to engineer. For engineering the material properties of the structure, they suggested changing the branching patterns of beta-glucan in order to achieve stronger cell walls, or changing the acetylation of chitin. Sadly we didn’t have the time to do this.
Lastly, they gave us advice on how to grow these filamentous fungi and how to easily transfer the fungi from liquid medium to the solid substrates.
Hyphaebox
Hyphaebox is a startup from DTU that produces packaging materials from mycotecture. They shared their expertise in growing mycotecture, including which substrates, temperatures and ambient moisture are best suited for producing high quality myco materials.
As they are a startup that focuses on design, they are interested in knowing more of the technical aspects of the materials. Therefore, they asked us to look into the effects of growing on different substrates and material properties of the products. In addition, they are interested in data from other types of fungi. They used shiitake (Lentinula edodes) for their materials and are interested in what other fungal species could be useful for production of materials.
Ecovative
An important part of our project was making bricks out of fungus, and since we were not the first to take this approach, we contacted the firm Ecovative Design. They are the leading commercial manufacturer of fungal materials, and we wanted to get their input on which features they could see us targeting for our project.
One of the suggestions from Ecovative was to integrate color changes into the mycelium, either in the form of chromoproteins or pigments, as color-control could be a huge market for them. Therefore, we started on assembling a chromoprotein cassette for insertion into the filamentous fungi. We also assembled a melanin producing cassette, which could give the material a darker look. The effect of our results can be seen as two-fold; firstly, we’ve demonstrated the availability for changes of interest in chosen fungus species and secondly, the material could be made to look appealing both in regards to building materials, but also in home-decor.
In addition, if we could control the branching pattern or the cell wall thickness, it could be a huge leap in the structural abilities of the end products. We researched the possibilities and found the gene GfaA, which synthesizes the limiting metabolite in the chitin pathway (1). In addition to these genes, we modeled the growth on fungal mycelium and its branching pattern.
In parallel to working with the genetics of the fungal engineering, we also tackled the process of protoplasting and transforming filamentous fungi. Ecovative Design shared their protoplasting protocol with us and we got to work on implementing the protocol.
During our experimentation we tried to optimize the protocol by substituting an expensive reagent, driselase, with a more affordable one. We used higher concentrations of Glucanex than originally and different digestion times instead of following the protocol with their digestion times and concentration of driselase. It was originally speculated that only Glucanex could be used, increasing the profitability of Ecovative Design. However, further research is needed as we did not successfully produce any protoplasts in any of the tries.
Green Challenge
The Green Challenge is an annual challenge at DTU in which students can enter with either a startup or a project. We entered with our iGEM project to take advantage of the hundreds of experts ranging from researchers to politicians in multiple subjects. As we were still in the early process of our project, we knew that we would gain most by keeping it simple and let the experts ask us questions to learn more about aspects in which we hadn’t really thought about yet. Therefore, we only presented ourselves as ‘Mycomaterials’. There was encouragement from most and one of the winnings projects of the event was also regarding mycelium products for common use.
Snapchat takeover
We were lucky enough to be offered to take over the DTU snapchat account for one of the three days of the BioBrick Tutorial. Our vision in doing so was to primarily letting the roughly 11,000 other DTU students get an inside view of what being a member of the DTU Biobuilders means. The takeover happened before we had settled on a project, so the main focus was showing the event and bringing the audience along in the activities that took place during the tutorial. On Saturday during the iGEM Giant Jamboree, we will again take over the snapchat account and document our time in Boston - this time going a bit more in depth in communicating our project to the world. Anyone interested can follow us on the official DTU Snapchat: dtudk.
Kulturnatten (Culture Night)
'Københavns Kulturnat’ is an annual event held all over Copenhagen. It gathers people and allows them to experience many of the things that Copenhagen has to offer. Our team was lucky enough to be offered to participate at the Tycho Brahe Planetarium along with the UCPH team with whom we had at that point collaborated to write a report on Mars colonization.
You can read the report here.
Our two teams decided to extend our collaboration while still representing our individual teams’ projects at the event. For example, we brought samples of our building material for display, engaged the younger audience by letting them create their “Mars habitat” (by shaping buildings out of clay) while we encouraged the remaining visitors to let us know their opinions on some of the issues that we have discussed in our collaboration report. We had set up a questionnaire with only “yes”, “no”, and “don’t know” options to five questions on Mars colonization related to the report. The difficulty of answering a question so briefly really allowed us to talk to the visitors about the issues as much as possible. The answers to the questionnaires can be found as pie charts.
We found that people were generally for going to Mars, but as our conversations revealed, there were a lot more nuance to the subject. Something that came up a lot was the argumentation of traveling to Mars. Many of the arguments presented in the second part of the report were echoed by the visitors, especially whether we could justify spending our resources on colonizing Mars instead of fixing the problems at home. There were many different takes on this dilemma, which suggests it is a valuable issue to continue working on and elucidation of the finer nuances. The overall question of “Should humanity colonize Mars” worked as a visual poll that could be followed throughout the night with only “yes” and “no” as possible answers. This had about twice as many respondents compared to the questionnaire.
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At the yearly event of ‘Kulturnatten’ (Culture night), we had a stand together with the UCopenhagen iGEM team. We talked about our projects, biotechnology and the prospects of colonizing Mars. A lot of interested visitors came by and answered our questionnaire about whether they thought we should colonize Mars. A whopping 28 out of 36 participants thought that there would be a manned mission to Mars within the next 30 years, see fig 1. Furthermore, ⅔ of the participants thought that genetically engineered organisms could be useful for the survival of the colonists on the red planet, fig 2.
For our other questions, the answers were a bit more split. In the case of land-ownership on Mars as on Earth and whether humanity will be forced to send people to Mars for the sake of survival, around half of the answers indicated that people believed the statements, fig 3 & 4.
The last two questions, fig 5 & 6, “Should humans colonize Mars?” and “Do you think it’s problematic to send people to Mars before we’ve discovered whether there is life on Mars or not?” shows an interesting trend. We see that many people have a positive attitude with regards to colonizing the red planet, but, not that many people thought it was problematic to send people to Mars without know if there is life there already. This could become problematic considering our earlier history with colonizing foreign lands for personal gain. Furthermore, we have to consider if we have an obligation to protect the environment, or if we only have an obligation to ourselves, to expand our power for the sake of power.
(1) Qiu, Z.; Wu, X.; Gao, W.; Zhang, J.; Huang, C. High Temperature Induced Disruption of the Cell Wall Integrity and Structure in Pleurotus Ostreatus Mycelia. Appl. Microbiol. Biotechnol. 2018, 102 (15), 6627–6636