Team:Kyoto/Integrated Human Practices
As introduced in Human Practice, at iGEM Kyoto 2018, we jumped out of the laboratory, made exchanges with a wide variety of people, learned a lot of things and added depth to the contents of the project. In this page, we will introduce an overview of how these Human Practice activities educated us and led to the improvement of the project.We will introduce it by dividing into three parts.
The first is an interview with salt damage experts and what we learned from it. We were able to learn about the specific circumstances that we could apply our device and got insight into the needs and concerns of salt damage, and these lead to the design of a new device.
The second relates to the first part, and it is a biosafety problem. From Public Engagement activities and exchanges with experts, we recognized the needs of further safety measures for our devices, and we decided to move on to the development of new parts to guide yeast cell aggregation. This is the point that iGEM Kyoto's project this year received the greatest influence from Human Practice.
Thirdly, in order to create a more efficient salt absorbing device, we interacted with many experts. Starting from the device creation method, we learned performance evaluation method, the creation of the final device form, and application method. From their advice, the outline of this project was determined.
As we showed in this result, salt concentration has a great influence on protein-protein interaction. Besides, the behavior of various biomolecules is greatly influenced by salt concentration. Rather than solving this device in the test tube alone, is there any possibility of expanding the application to solve something more social? While exploring this question, we encountered a serious problem caused by high salt concentration, it is salt damage.
Salt damage is a phenomenon that the growth of crops is inhibited by salt accumulation in the soil. Since plants do not require salt for growth, excess salts in the soil become growth inhibiting substances. For example, high concentrations of sodium ions in the soil cause osmotic pressure to increase and inhibit the ability to suck up water, soils lose their water holding capacity, and enzyme reactions in plant bodies are inhibited.
Salt damage is occurring in one-fifth of the world's agricultural land. Is it possible that our device will contribute even a bit to this problem? We searched for an expert on salt damage and explored the possibility to find an answer to this question.