Team:Ruperto Carola/HP/integrated
Integrated Human Practices
How everything began …
“Warning! The Federal Ministry of Food and Agriculture of the Federal Republic of Germany hereby gives you notice that: Highly contagious African Swine Fever has been spreading through Europe since 2014 and is now a threat of millions of domestic pics and wild boar. This disease, which is not dangerous for humans, can be transmitted by food. Please make sure that all leftover food is put in sealed waste containers!” Our project started with reading headlines in newspaper articles, websites and huge warning billboards at airports as well as service stations in Germany. This was the moment when we realized how severe it was. ASF is spreading very fast and by now endemic to many different countries.
We knew that there was no effective vaccine to protect pigs from the virus and that ASF infected animals, including domestic pigs and wild boars, have a lethality rate of almost 100 %. This was the point where we knew we had the chance to do something to support public awareness about the virus, disease and how to handle it, to talk to the meat industry and to start a big project with a dedication to ASF diagnostics.
To inform ourselves and talk to leading companies of the meat industry, we visited the international trade fair for the meat industry (IFFA) in Frankfurt. There we tried to inform different stakeholders about our project and raise awareness to achieve responsible and considerate handling of the dangerous ASF virus. We introduced our idea to create a point-of-care (POC) test as a diagnostic tool for the farmers. Such a test could save the industry a lot of money while most importantly, sparing many swine’s lives. In addition, fewer carcasses would save the environment by reducing the strains imposed by rotting bodies.
Even though people liked our idea, they did not show much interest in appreciation for our project. In fact, all the representatives from the industry told us more or less directly, that culling infected animals was their way of dealing with ASF. They were aware of the drastic economic consequences, but in their industrial considerations, there was no value in preserving pigs‘ lives. Quite on the contrary, did they tell us that from their profit-oriented point of view they were approving current practices of massive culling based on their calculations. Furthermore, they told us they had taken economic precautions in case ASF was to break out: Their insurance covers cases of plague. So, our great idea to develop diagnostic test for a point-of-care (POC) assay for ASF turned out to be not as appreciated as expected.
Still, we wanted to shed some light on the global crisis that is ASF. Therefore we collaborated with iGEM Taiwan to conduct a survey featuring people's experiences with ASF. The results of the survey emphasized our impressions from the IFFA. In Germany the awareness level ranged from completely negligent of ASF to lacking interest about it, even when already having heard about it. These different aspects encouraged us to reevaluate our project and redesign our overall approach broadly We did a lot of research on detection systems in general: We found out that there was no system to detect small peptides of <1.5 kDa. Then we broadened our project’s scope to deal with small peptide detection. Thus, we decided to abstain from the idea to fully focus on ASF and the diagnostic track and think about detection systems in general.
Moreover, we decided to interview an expert in molecular biology to decide on the best chassis for our approach. We therefore talked to Prof. Knop, one of the leading experts in signal transduction and yeast biology, and discussed our project with him. He showed great appreciation for our idea of going for a detection platform. Furthermore, he described the advantages of a yeast-based system and its simplicity. Thereby he encouraged us to use it for our approach. As we wanted to create a simple to use and inexpensive tool, we finally decided on yeast as our model organism to build a detection system upon.
As we chose fluorescent colorings to make the signal visible, we developed the slogan “Make science visible!”, that would describe not only our wet lab but also our human practice approach. After intense discussions within the team, we decided to broaden the scope of the project by aiming at creating a live-cell peptide detection platform in yeast, adaptable to a wide spectrum of peptides relevant to a variety of applications. By this, we aim to provide a platform for designing and implementing directed evolution of yeast GPCRs in the hope that it will be of high potential for future researchers.
Ideally, the directed evolution of receptors could be of comparable importance to the already booming application of evolved enzymes currently affecting many aspects of everyday life. This system would help fellow researchers design substrate walking and directed evolution experiments and thereby be a valuable toolbox for a multitude of approaches.