Team:NAU-CHINA/HP Summary
Human Practices Summary
What makes a man great is that he follows someone greater and make others greater.
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The human practices have done a lot to conduct public promotion, shape and modify our project as well as pointing directions for mathematical model designs in the past eight months.
Careful and creative thoughts have been put to the design of each step of the human practices to make sure our work is responsible and good for our project—MARS and the world. The documents of every activity we have done is written in detail. We also analyze and study the feedbacks from one activity, conclude and discuss the result as well as what we have learnt and work out a plan for the next activity according to the result of this one. The details are as follows.
In March
We visited professor Ai Xia of Nanjing Agricultural University and consoled her with our project’s pervious version. After hearing our project, the professor gave us several advised. First and foremost, since our original design was to engineer bacteria to kill mosquitos rather than to kill the plasmodium, she told us that mosquitos are an essential part of the ecosystem and it might cause problems if we reduce its number. What’s more, if we chose to kill the mosquitos, the engineered bacteria could not wide spread. Instead, we could use a more mosquito-friendly method and use symbiotic bacteria to achieve a better colonization effect. Therefore, we used Serratia marcescens, a kind of symbiotic bacteria inside mosquitos, to secrete anti-Plasmodium effector proteins to stop plasmodium from entering the mosquitos. She also told us the Yunnan Institute of Parasitic Diseases is a research center for Plasmodium in China, and we can pay a visit if we ever had problems.
In April
We went to the Yunnan Institute of Parasitic Diseases to ask how to solve the drug resistance problem which the Plasmodium had. In conclusion, we learnt that a Plasmodium cell can’t develop resistance to multiple drugs, thus we chose to use nine different anti-Plasmodium effector proteins, which are SM1, Drosomycin, MeuTXKβ1, Vida3, MP2, Gomesin, Thiostrepton, Shiva3 and AdDLP. Such modification directed by HP have a huge impact on our project, making MARS more effective.
In May
MARS had faced a new problem which is to choose a specific and efficient enzyme to cut off the anti-Plasmodium effector proteins (a fusion protein) to let all nine anti-Plasmodium effector proteins have their best effect. Professor Yiping Wang from College of Life Science in Peking University, who primarily works on nitrogen fixing bacteria, the coupling of carbon metabolism and nitrogen metabolism, and the prokaryotic secretion system, came to our university and give a lecture on using synthetic biology to perfect the nitrogen fixation system inside bacteria a few weeks ago. It was on this lecture that we learnt a pecific and efficient enzyme which met our needs called TEVp (Tobacco Etch Virus protease). We contact Professor Wang and explained our problems, he told us that TEVp can preform this task well. So we add it to our design. At that time we have almost finished MARS’ design, so we felt its necessary to find out the people’s acceptance of MARS.
In June
We conduct a survey to find out people’s acceptance of MARS. It’s no surprise to see that most people approve MARS and most comments are positive as well. We believe people accept it because stopping malaria is of great significance and most participant thinks it’s quite creative and novelty to stop a disease using a method like this. Most people also consider it to be very effective since the bacteria can spread in a certain population. However, most people believe it’s ok to kill mosquitos to stop malaria, they failed to realize their positive effect to the ecology system. Thus, we think it’s necessary to promote the importance of mosquitos in the coming events. We also promoted NAU-iGEM Campus Competition and held Agar Art Campus Competition to promote and rose people’s attention of MARS, synthetic biology and iGEM. Each participants was over 500, and the feedbacks were quite promising, so we decided to make further promotion by facing the society.
In Summer vacation
In July, we held the the opening ceremony of NAU-iGEM Campus Competition which is the second step of the NAU-iGEM Campus Competition.
In August, we attend the
In September
We went to the Nanjing Science and Technology Museum to conduct further promotion to the public. During the promotion, we not only explain what we did, what synthetic biology was but also test how well they understand them. We also use posters and conducted fun experiments. Most importantly, we explained how important mosquitos are to the society. We also held the
In October
We hold the closing ceremony of the NAU-iGEM Campus Competition which complete the competition. We then and summarize our work and edit the Wiki’s HP part.
In all
As a “bigger picture” of iGEM, with the highest ideal to apply synthetic biology to benefit the world, the eight-month-long human practice of our team goes along with our project. On the one hand, we establish and improve our project, and apply our project to the real world. On the other hand, we bring scientific knowledge to the general public, educate teenagers and inspire students. Through human practice, we understand the relationship between the world and synthetic biology.