The RocKit with its open database, the RocCloud, is a laboratory tool kit which can evolve surface receptors in yeast cells to generate specificity for any desired target molecule. The DNA sequence for the newly obtained surface receptor can be uploaded in the RocCloud to share it with the whole scientific community and exchange receptor sequences. Our team developed a tool kit which is highly versatile, it can be used in many scientific fields and therefore could help to tackle many real-life problems. To reflect the versality of our kit, we decided to utilise integrated human practices to gain insights into the perspective of the general public, the scientific community as to the legalities and safety of the project.
First, we conducted a survey in which we gathered information about how the general public views GMOs and Synthetic Biology. We analysed this information and integrated the results in our education and engagement events, where we explained concepts that seemed to be misunderstood in the survey or tried to ease the fears that were named in the questionnaire by pointing out EU- and world-wide policies to prevent the misuse of GMOs. Which leads to the next part of our integrated human practices in which we took part in the safe-by-design programme issued by the Dutch government. For this, we analysed potential safety issues of our project and how they can be prevented and summarized the results in an infographic. In the next step we visited the Systems Biology institute MaCSBio, where we presented our project and obtained feedback on how our project could be improved to be used in laboratories, but also about future modelling perspectives of our mutation system. This leads to our last part of integrated human practices, where we analysed the legal rights on our RocKit, on the open database the RocCloud and the new generated and uploaded DNA sequences.
To get more information on our integrated human practices, click on the icons below:
References
1. MaCSBio. (2019). MaCSBio. Retrieved from Maastricht University: https://www.maastrichtuniversity.nl/research/maastricht-centre-systems-biology abgerufen
