Team:Nanjing High School/Demonstrate

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Demonstrate

Demonstrate
Our project is to detect the time that people, especially employees, expose to blue light when they are in front of electronic devices. The phrase “Blue light” is commonly heard in our daily life. Increasingly, people are exposed to blue light via everyday technology that some studies even suggest that 60% of people spend more than 6 hours a day in front of a digital device. While designing our product, we aim to make it clearly show how long an individual receives blue light radiation. As blue light harms eyes, we create the product to remind people of avoiding these rays. In China, and also in some companies in other country, people practice the “996” system. The system means that people works from nine o’clock in the morning to nine o’clock in the evening for six days a week. Although this system improves the efficiency in some degrees, it’s a tiring and tough job for employees. For some employees may receive blue light radiation for so long time a day without awareness, we develop this product to help them. More specifically, the product enables people to notice that they have been sitting in front of a computer for a long time, thus warning them to take a break, and care about their eyes. Experiments in our labs has proved that the blue sensor successfully added in our product has the ability to show the time of illumination as well. We can provide a much more convenient way to let people be aware of how much radiation and for how long time they have received. 

Reference:
bluelightexposed. (2016, Jan 15). Retrieved from bluelightexposed: http://www.bluelightexposed.com/#bluelightexposed

Original Plan
In the very beginning of our project, we wanted to popularize a cheap but effective product to monitor the amount of the blue light in our circumstance. In this way, our customers may take actions to protect themselves from the harm of the blue light because through the statistics they will be aware of the fact that the blue laser is damaging their bodies. By interviewing an inventor of a new type of anti-blue light glasses, we know that the major source of the blue light is the electronic devices. We aimed at those employees who sit in their offices all day long and use their electronic devices frequently as they are the largest group of victims we could come up with.

Improvement
As the implement of our project over time, we found that there was a much larger group of people suffering from the blue light. According to our online questionnaire, from those who were workers to those who were employees or leaders in the company, statistics show that most of these people have sever health problems that were usually blamed on the blue light. We firmly believed that our products can bring a healthier life to more people. As a result, we came up with the business model curtain. What is more, we also gave more tries in the lab environment because we must make sure that our products are 100% safe and convenient for normal people to use.

Things we have done
During our experiments, many things have been done and we have got some meaningful results.


Firstly, we successfully constructed the plasmids we need. Our primary gaol was to construct FixK2-Cas1Cas2, pCDF-T7-BlueSensor, pET28a-FixK2-TfusCas3, and pACYC-J23100-BlueSensor. Here is our constructing results.

(Fig.1 The gel analysis results of  FixK2-Cas1Cas2 (approximately 1600bp), and pET28a-FixK2-TfusCas3 (approximately 8000bp). )


(Fig.2 The gel analysis of Blue Sensor (approximately 5400bp). )

Light Experiment:

The cells that we used in the light experiment were:
① T1:
pCDF-T7-Cas1Cas2

② F1:
pSB1C3-Fixk2-Cas1Cas2
pCDF-T7-Blue Sensor

③ F3:
pET28a-Fixk2-TfusCas3
pCDF-T7-Cas1Cas2
pACYC-J23100-Blue Sensor

T1 was the control group which was not affected by blue light.
F1 was growing without the presence of blue light. It was supposed to have DNA lengthening.
DF1 was growing with the presence of blue light. It was supposed to have little or no DNA lengthening.
F3 was growing without the presence of blue light. It was supposed to have little or no DNA lengthening.
DF3 It was supposed to have little or no DNA lengthening. It was supposed to have DNA lengthening.
(See Design for details about how they function, click Link)

Result:
During our project, we have designed a new part to record the time E.coli is exposed to blue light. Cas1-Cas2 is a special protein that can catch fragments. In our experiment, we transferred the plasmid with this protein to the micro-organism so that when the micro-organism is placed under blue light, the promoter will function and the protein will then begin to catch fragments. After a certain amount of time, gel analysis we did to examine the result showed that samples under blue light had a shorter strip, which meant Cas1-Cas2 effectively caught and stored the fragments.


Significant length growth in T1 cells are found.
No length growth in DF1 and F1 cells.
No length growth in DF3 cells. Significant length growth in F3 cells.

Discussion:

① Significant length growth in T1 cells indicated that our CRISPR system work well.
② As more experiments were done, F3 cells, with or without blue light presence, never had length growth.   We considered that original F3 cells had already been contaminated.
③ The experiment result on F3 were completely opposite of what we expected.

  1. Promoter efficiency might be poor.
  2. The wavelength of the blue light that were bought online were not tested, so there might be problems exist with the light.
  3. The stability of plasmids were not good. There might be situations where the cells that were used for light experiment lost their plasmids over time.
  4. The rate of protein degradation in cells had not been measured, so the measurement of DNA capture efficiencymight be affected.

 

Another experiment result

 

 

Things we have not done yet
Unfortunately, due to the limited time we have, we have not find an easy way to mass produce our concept. Consequently, we gave up testing our products in the real world simply because the number of our samples was too small. If we put only two or three samples in some selective companies, we can not receive sufficient statistics to draw the conclusion. Plus, we did not visit some schools and give out keynote speech since most of the students were enjoying their summer vacations.
Future product
In contemporary world, designs like anti-blue light glasses which prevent customers from over expose to blue light are prevalent, but designs that are capable of visualizing the amount of time they spent with blue laser are rare. We want to design a cheap but effective product to monitor the amount of the blue light using our micro-organism. Through data analysis, our customers may clearly be aware of the amount of time they spend in front of electronic devices and take actions to protect themselves from the harm of the blue light. For example, we think of a kind of necklace to contain our micro-organism. It is a hollow small ball made of glasses, and we can put our bacteria liquid into the ball. When wearing this necklace, blue light can be caught by the funstion of the micro-organism in the necklace. After a day or a week of work, our customers can send the necklace back to our laboratory, let us to examine the total time, and change new bacteria liquid. If customers want a more beautiful style, we can provide things like flowers to decorate the necklace. Moreover,if pur customers think that the necklace is inconvenient, we also offer small glass bottles that can be place on the desk to record the time.




Conclusion
Generally speaking, we have achieved all the key points in our original plan but left some ideals remain unimplemented due to many factors. However, we hold that the competition is not the end of our project. Even after the competition, we will continue our project and truly protect others from the harm of the blue light.