Team:British Columbia/Inspiration
A good portion of our team grew up in Vancouver — a coastal city in a lush rainforest, with stark mountain faces overlooking it. Touching its shores is the Pacific Ocean, which is an unfathomably large body of water; its colours ranging from deep, dark blues, to almost ethereal sea greens. The intertidal regions on Vancouver’s shorelines are some of the most biodiverse in the world. We really appreciate what we have here, but Indigenous and rural communities lining the seascape and interior of British Columbia appreciate it even more.
Marine ecosystems and organisms, especially shellfish, are an essential component of their everyday life, and are embedded deeply in their history, heritage, and culture. We understand this incredible relationship, and as a team with access to such a remarkable set of tools, we desire to do everything we can to protect and safeguard the link these people have with aquatic fauna, through the use of synthetic biology. That’s why we decided to develop a method to prevent paralytic shellfish poisoning (PSP) — a neurotoxic illness that has devastated families not just in BC, but all over the world. We believe being students in an environment like this has had a profound impact on our ideas and our view of the world, and made us want to bring together a project that had meaningful implications in our local community.
The process wasn’t this simple, however. In the early days of this past year, we had a strong “why”, but the “how” was more difficult to address. We knew who and why we wanted to help, and we wanted to tie it into food safety, agriculture somehow and the local economy. With this in mind, after many hours of research, we learned that a very big, unaddressed problem in British Columbia is the lack of onsite testing for Paralytic Shellfish Toxins (PSTs), especially in Indigenous populations. The Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) and scientists from Fisheries and Oceans Canada called upon the people of Canada to propose a solutionto this issue, and we responded. This problem is a growing one, and with increasing climate change and nitrogen pollution, harmful algal blooms that produce the PSTs are becoming more and more prevalent.
In the face of all of this, we wanted to ensure our research objectives would result in meaningful change, while being measurable and achievable for our team in the time we had. Developing an oceanic project felt inherently right, and we believe it is a useful application of synthetic biology, because it is geared towards bettering the lives of many, and reducing the number of global fatalities due to Paralytic Shellfish Poisoning (PSP). We harnessed the power of toxin-inducible promoter machinery to do this — which was an attainable project in our time-frame, and an innovative and potentially disruptive use of synthetic biology in the light of a growing issue.