Institute of Pomology of Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences (IPCAAS) specializes in the development of high quality fruit in agricultural studies. They are the leading researchers in the field of banana speciation and cultivation.

Launching the inquiries into the cultivation of bananas, the Chinese University of Hong Kong iGEM team 2019 paid a visit to the IPCAAS and seeked for optimized design regarding Banana Savior. We were given the opportunity to interview the Vice Director, Chunyu Li, who is experienced in Banana Genetic Improvement lab, Key Laboratory of South Subtropical Fruit Biology and Genetic Resource Utilization, and the Innovation team of Banana Genetic Improvement. The feedback given was constructive and enabled us to design a finalized product.

The suggestions given by the Director Chunyu Li was that the current detection methods are still limited and one of the areas that could be expanded into is the on-site detection of the bananas from Xanthonomas bacterium. His words opened up another path of detection kit as product to us, which then was suggested can be applicable to custom use of elimination of infected bananas from getting imported in certain countries or regions.

Questionnaire about acknowledgement for banana consumption and comments toward GM food in Hong Kong

We have distributed a questionnaire to the general public predominately university, high school students and graduates to see their knowledge on banana disease, genetically modified crops and their views on genetically modified food in the market. We have collected 116 online responses and this survey helped improve our project.

From the survey, we found that the public have low degree of knowledge on banana disease and transgenic food. Most of them have not heard about banana bacterial infection or the presence of transgenic papayas available in the market. Around half of the interviewees know that bananas have similar genetic makeup, but very few of them know that pathogen infection in bananas can lead to banana total loss due to low gene diversity. It appeals to us that education of food crop diseases and genetically modified food is necessary. Therefore, to educate the public, we introduced BXW infection and genetically modified foods to secondary school and university students on our synthetic biology workshop.

In order to solve the BXW bacterial infection, the academia had proposed to create a genetically engineered banana strain that is resistant to the infection.

However, from our survey, 30% of people claimed that they would choose wild type food over genetically modified ones. From their response, we found that people are not familiar with genetically modified food. They are worried about the potential risk of consuming genetically modified food. Some believes that mass production of transgenic food for commercial sales is an ignorance act. It seems to us that there is still a huge controversy over genetically modified food. We believe that these kind of gene modifications should not be done unless the society has come to a consensus.

Thus, we modified the approach from altering the wild type banana gene to developing an early detection method which aims to avoid the spreading of banana disease at the first stage of infection.

Team:Hong Kong-CUHK/Human Practices

Integrated Human Practice

Interview with Institute of Pomology of Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences (IPCAAS) (May 2019)

Questionnaire about acknowledgement for banana consumption and comments toward GM food in Hong Kong