According to statistics, the microbes we touched each day are about 3 times more than the human cells. Some specific microbes can cause infectious diseases and give unpleasant smells. Bacteria can infect any area of the body and cause different diseases: pneumonia, meningitis, food poisoning, etc. This year, we focus on infectious microbes and unpleasant smell, mainly in external environment waste beaker in the lab, and internal environment axilla. To stay on track to tackle real-life environmental problems by our PLA and 2-PE(more details of them on our Description page) in a more efficient, environmentally friendly way, here we established a good dialogue with society and integrated societal considerations throughout the design and execution in our project.

Interview & Consultation

Environmental Protection Bureau

This year, we aim to tackle real-life environmental problems, hoping to apply our PLA and 2-PE to address urgent human needs. Therefore, we went on a visit to Environmental Protection Bureau for getting more information about infectious bacteria and unpleasant smell in daily life. In the external environment, where is the most enriched area of bacteria, and often accompanied by unpleasant odors? What firstly comes to our mind is the trash can surrounding us. We exchanged our idea with the environmental specialist, which we planned to apply our rose-scented bacteriostat to the trash can. The expert thought tackling real-life environmental problems with our PLA and 2-PE is an innovative and interesting method, but pointed out that the environment of the trash may be more complicated than we think. Through the conversation to the specialist, and inspired by laboratory routine, we finally narrowed our scope to the beakers in the lab, which are always full of bacteria and give off unpleasant smells. (More details on our design page)

JCI Accredited Academic Medical Center Hospital

Except for focusing on external environment trash can, we also threw great attention to internal environment axilla, where are abundant varieties of microbes and is the culprit of unpleasant smell. Such unpleasant smell brings great trouble to the public. To speak to stakeholders and evaluate our project, we went to JCI Accredited Academic Medical Center Hospital and further understood that, the current solution for bromhidrosis is generally divided two parts. The one is sterilized with alcohol, aluminum salt antiperspirant, which way may clog pores, and have some influence on the environment. Also, some people may be more sensitive to alcohol. The other is surgical therapy, which could cause some adverse reactions to the skin and leave unsightly scars. In comparison, our 2-PE and PLA are food grade substance, which are absolutely safe and more friendly to people and the environment.
Besides, we communicated with dermatologist Dr. Zhang, deputy chief physician about our project. The doctor said our project sounds interesting and antibacterial substance PLA can be applied in other clinical aspects. About the impact of broad-spectrum antibacterial, the doctor pointed that our armpit area is small, and sterilization is only local sterilization, which will not cause too much impact on the flora on the skin.

Fu Shimei Co., Ltd.

Also, we went on a visit to Fu Shimei Co., Ltd.. We learned about that current antibacterial products are usually chemically synthesized, the process of which is complex, costly and cause certain environmental pollution. Rose spice is traditionally extracted from rose with low yield, now is mostly produced by chemical synthesis, which produces unwanted by-products and environmentally unfriendly. Comparatively speaking, our PLA and 2-PE are considered as nature and safe by European and U.S. food agencies, and what we produced with synthetic biology is more environmentally-friendly, nature and safer. After listening to our introduction, the sales manager believes that our rose-scented bacteriostat have certain economic benefits and broad market prospects.
In addition, here we got closer to emulsion manufacturing process, and have got some guidance for our applied design. They fully affirmed our vision of making deodorant lotions and provided us with the formula for making this lotion. (More details on our Applied Design page)

Investigation

Questionnaire

It is very important to societal considerations throughout the design and execution in our project, towards our vision of a healthier, greener and sustainable world. In the early times of our project, we designed a questionnaire and distribute it online and throughout our activities. The participants reached over 200 at the age of 18 to 55 years. The feedback showed that, the majority of people are eager to have a better product to deal with harmful bacteria and unpleasant smells in life, for that they think there are many shortcomings of the products on the market. 63% of people have a more positive and non-objective attitude toward applying safe bacteria to the skin.(Click here to see our questionnaire)

Alternatives of PLA

To evaluate how our project affects the society, we try to make a functional comparison about our rose-scented bacteriostat and like products on the market. After market research, we chose a kind of sanitizer with jasmine fragrance and one kind of soap which is typical on the market as comparison. We exposed the prepared plates to the laboratory for 12 hours and then applied the same amount of these three products on the plates. They were observed after 12 hours of incubation in the same environment. We obviously found that the soap of such brand has a relatively weaker antibacterial effect than the other two products. In addition, we use synthetic biology to produce such rose-scented bacteriostat, reducing the burden on the environment and being safer and more friendly to people. Our project may have certain economic benefits.(More details on our Demonstrate page)

Seek input from experts “in the field’

To ensure that our project would stay on track to tackle real-life problems, we continuously sought into from people specializing in different fields.

Pro. Li
This year, our team produced phenyllaclic acid (PLA) and 2-phenylethanol (2-PE) by synthetic biology, which are chemical substance. So we interviewed Pro. Li to discuss our thoughts, who majors in organic chemistry. He provided us with some possible ways of generating such substance from a chemical point of view, which has made great help for to project design and guided us to achieve the corresponding reaction with the enzymes.(More details on our Description page) .

Pro. Wang
The professor Wang is an expert in the field of synthetic biology. After listening to our project, he thought that our idea is innovative and interesting, and also raised a question, how much PLA can kill the bacteria? That triggered our thinking, and finally we found the most suitable quantity of engineered bacteria we need to put in the product that can inhibit the bacteria effectively by established valuable models.(More details on our Modeling page)

Dr. Liu
We also interviewed Dr. Liu. In response to eliminate unpleasant axilla odors, she said in addition to degrading the odorous substance, it can be covered with other fragrances, which is consistent with our idea of using 2-pe to cover up the unpleasant odors.

Dr. Andreas Natsch
To make our project on bromidrosis more comprehensive and get more professional advice, we have got in touch with Dr. Andreas Natsch, who is an expert on the area of bromidrosis and whose literature gave us lots of reference. After reading his literature, we knew about the mechanism of bromidrosis and get the inspiration of constructing degrading enzymes to eliminate the odorant acids, E-3M2H. Then, we sent an E-mail to him, in which we introduced him our approach to bromidrosis and put up some questions we encountered throughout our project. And later we were lucky to hear from him. In his reply, he firstly solved our confusion about the category of the bacteria under axilla and gave us some feedback about our project. He thinks that it’s an innovative way to use bacteria to solve the problem of bromidrosis, and the acceptance level of the public also need to be taken into consideration, and then we designed a questionnaire to evaluate this issue.(Can be found on our investigation above).

Which concentration of 2-PE is the most pleasant ?

To tackle real-life environmental problems, except for killing harmful bacteria with PLA (phenyllaclic acid), we also want to cover up the unpleasant smell with rose-like fragrance from 2-PE (2-phenylethanol). However, we encountered a problem that because of people’s different perceptions of odor, we don’t know which concentration of 2-PE we produce is the most acceptable for the public. And then we wanted to seek answer from human practice.
We designed a “smell game” to get the public involved throughout the whole summer. We prepared different concentrations of 2-PE (1mmol/L, 3mmol/L, 5mmol/L, 10mmol/L, 15mmol/L, 20mmol/L) in unknown tubes to let people smell and evaluate about their feelings. The game was launched during our school’s 110th anniversary, public activities and some other special times. More than 200 people have participated in our “smell game”, they are of different ages and the ratio of women and men is quite. After analyzing the feedback, we found 2-PE above 15mmol/L is not very pleasant, while which of 5mmol/L and 10mmol/L is more popular. 5mmol/L of 2-PE is most acceptable for the most people.

Based on the result of our “smell game”, we improved our experiment to achieve 5mmol/L yield of 2-PE. The first figure shows our initial 2-PE yield, and the optimized 2-pe yield is shown in the second figure.(More details on our Results page)

Safety

Biosafety is of great significance, and we must put it into consideration. Thought teams under the environment track focus on different issues, we are all faced with the limited application scenarios and public concerns, which pose barriers for the practical use of projects. We collaborated with ECUST to propose “Three Plus Net”, which include three parts, “Application+”, “Biosafety+”, “Society+” and can be an example for other teams under the environment. Firstly we hope to better translate the results into practical applications and bring greater social value. And then is to make a general guide to universal issues, so that people can use it to supplement topics and improve the subject. The third is to get the public's view on using engineering bacteria for environmental restoration.

Throughout the “3+ Net”, we are mainly responsible for “Biosafety+”. In scientific methods, we always cite some simple means to guarantee safety of our project, such as designing suicide switches, knocking out resistance genes, genome integration, visualization of genetically engineered bacteria, hardware design, network monitoring, and so on. We have made a summary of the current common suicide switches for different types of environmental conditions, which can give reference and convenience to other teams under the environment. [Get our PDF file]

“2-Pleasant” handbook

From the feedback of questionnaires in the early period, we realized that 81% of people know less about harmful bacteria in daily life, which inspired the idea of making a handbook about prevention of harmful bacteria. The handbook covers basic knowledge of bacteria around us, tips for preventing bacteria and our innovate solution with synthetic biology. And we have distributed it around the world, hoping to reach the goal of getting people to pay more attention to harmful bacteria and know more about synthetic biology in a more interesting and attractive form. (More details on our Public Engagement & Education page)

In addition, we held a summer camp with the subject of “approaching to synthetic biology”, aiming to hopefully pass on our motivation and shaping the next generation of scientists. And we took part in the first iGEM Eurasian meetup 2018 and the 5th CCiC, to have a collision of ideas with other teams and get lots of useful advice. Please clik here to know more about our human practice.

Team:FJNU-China/Human Practices

Integrated Human Practices

Overview

Goals

Methods

Results