Team:ShanghaiFLS China/Human Practices

Team:ShanghaiFLS_China

Menu

• Home
• Team Team
  • Team
  • Collaborations
• Project Project
  • Description
  • Design
  • Experiments
  • Notebook
  • Characterization
  • Results
  • Model
  • Demonstrate
  • Attributions
• Parts Parts
  • Parts Overview
  • Basic Parts
  • Composite Parts
  • Part Collection
• Safety
• Human Practices Human Practices
  • Integrated Human Practices
  • Education and Engagement
• Judging Form

Human Practices

We actively consulted peers, research professionals, industry experts, and the general public for advice and guidance. We first met up with Dr. Cai from ECUST, who introduced us to Pichia pastoris GS115, a methylotrophic yeast strain that has great potentials for industrialized fermentation productions. After further research, we decided to base our project upon this yeast. We also interviewed representatives of two biotechnology companies. Dr. Hu, CEO of bioenergy company, GTL Biotech, illustrated the great potential of methanol as a carbon source, which happens to be what Pichia pastoris is tailored to metabolize. After designing our experiments, we referred to the opinion of the public for evaluations of acceptability, feasibility, and impact via a questionnaire. From the questionnaire, we became aware that our project would be far from industrial production. Therefore, we decided to make a model to demonstrate this possibility. We additionally modified our experimental design, specifically measuring the concentration of methanol and Pichia pastoris, at each time interval, to provide data for this model.

Interview with Professor Cai

Before the selection of the topic, we wanted to gain more insight into what top universities and researchers were doing at the time. Therefore, we contacted Professor Cai at East China University of Science and Technology, the top university in bioengineering in China. We were able to talk with him, to know what the most cutting-edge researchers were doing, and to narrow our field of research.

Professor Cai introduced that biological methods of conversion between one-carbon molecules were a pioneering field of research in biochemical engineering. The cycle was almost complete, but the transformation from methanol to other one-carbon molecules was missing. Through further investigation, we found out that engineering Pichia Pastoris would be yield somewhat promising results. We also found out that this topic would be related to environmental protection because there is already industrialized conversion from carbon dioxide and methane to methanol. If we could convert methanol to other carbon compounds, we would be able to reduce the carbon footprint.

The team also kept discussing with Professor Cai during our research. He provided us with useful instructions, and agreed to lend us a laboratory in the university as well as being our secondary PI.

Questionnaire

After we designed the experiment, we launched a questionnaire about global warming. We also asked experts in molecular biology and bioengineering whether they thought our project would succeed. We were able to get 762 responses, among which 73 were experts in biological or environmental science.

We talked about our project design in the questionnaire and asked experts whether they thought it would be successful. Most respondents thought it would be successful, but it would require some effort to experiment. With the advice, we paid additional attention to more challenging parts of the research.

In addition, we asked experts whether they thought our product would be successfully industrialized after trials in the lab. As was expected, a lot of respondents doubted if it would succeed and had concerns about cost, oxygen consumption, heat production, and so on. With further research, we decided to establish a model based on our experimental data to demonstrate that our design will have high potential if put into industrial use. We altered our experimental design to including measurements of methanol production and yeast concentration.

Interviews with Bio-fuel Companies

We also had an interview with Leading Tec, a company that works in bio-energy. The manager, Mr. Ni Liangping, briefly introduced the company and shared his point of view on our project.

Leading Tec chose to treat environmental problems using microorganisms rather than chemical methods not only because of the low profit but also because of the eco-environmental issue. ”The chemical method only converts one form of pollutant to another, but the total amount of nitrogen, phosphorus, and carbon in the environment doesn't change. The biological procedure, on the other hand, allows a simple organic matter to ingest such pollutants into its body. The pollutant is then included in the food chain. This is important because it provides nutrients and contributes to biodiversity,” says Mr. Ni.

During the experiment, we interviewed Dr. Hu Peng, CEO of GTL Biotech, a bio-energy company, which also works in the bio-energy field, for further exploration. Dr. Hu gave us instructions on our project and gave us a great lesson in the bio-energy field. According to him, converting glucose to other biofuels cost too much to make the biofuel’s price competitive in the market. Therefore, the company is working on methane. ”Natural gas, methane, has a much lower carbon footprint compared to coal and fossil fuels,” says Dr. Hu.

As an alumnus of MIT, Dr. Hu is very curious about our project. After a quick inquiry, he affirmed that our proposal was valid and wished us a good result in Boston.

=