Team:TPHS San Diego/Collaborations
Breakdown of Trimethylamine via Trimethylamine Dehydrogenase to Minimize Heart Disease Caused by Red Meat Consumption
Collaboration with Canyon Crest Academy and Del Norte High School
What we did?
As a part of our collaboration requirements, we decided to contact team members from local highschools Canyon Crest Academy and Del Norte. Together, we formed the San Diego Student iGEM Association (SDISA).
Together, our goal was to foster a collaborative spirit between teams and improve upon each other’s projects. To that end, we wanted to create survey questions with the SDISA in order to further our integrated human practices survey. We also decided to meet up with each other to practice presenting, improve project ideas, and work on lab protocols.
Our collaborations through the SDISA were quite successful. Our survey had carefully crafted questions about GMOs and specific details pertaining to our project. We succeeded in gauging public opinion on our project which allowed us to make more informed decisions on the future applications of our probiotic. We were also able to gain insightful feedback from each of the other school teams by presenting to them. We worked on adjusting our lab procedures as well as properly presenting our findings to a group.
Survey
What we did?
We created a survey with questions relating to GMOs and specific elements of our project. It was distributed to staff at our school, parents, and local members of our community.
What we wanted to achieve?
Our goal was to gauge public opinion of our GMO probiotic product. Since San Diego is a biotech hub, it would be feasible to implement the probiotic here. To that end, we wanted the public to understand what we were doing, how we were doing it, and the ways in which it would affect them. We also wanted to see if inherent biases in our community could affect our outreach or applications.
How did it go?
We were able to get a random sampling of people in our area. The results were indicative of a few things. We had a fairly event split of age demographics from under 18 all the way to early 70s. An overwhelming majority of about 96% of our community was aware of the existence of GMOs. Most did not mind their presence in medicine. They were ready to accept GMO medical treatments, but around 60% preferred a price reduction between 1 - 25% compared to non-GMO generics. However in terms of food, people had a more negative association with the phrase GMO, and instead opted for foods labeled organic, regardless of the actual science behind their creation. Our survey also had a few surprising responses pertaining to heart disease and red meat consumption. Even in our relatively affluent area, over 50% of people reported a family history of heart disease, atherosclerosis or high blood pressure. We were shown the wide-reaching impacts of these debilitating conditions, and could only imagine what statistics would indicate in more impoverished areas. Furthermore, after we discussed the effects of our probiotic, a staggering 83% said that they would continue to eat the same amount of red meat in conjunction with our product. This data indicates that people in our community are reluctant to change their lifestyles in most situations. However, although our survey results that indicated certain trends in the wider community, it is important to understand the biases of our sample for future data collection. For one thing, the population was closely centered in our fairly affluent area, where people have access to good education, medical care, and food products. Results about community awareness and history of medical conditions would certainly change if we widened our reach. In general, however, the community is seemingly accepting of our probiotic solution for mitigating atherosclerosis. In applying our product, we may need to take a more medicinal approach to a probiotic rather than a consumable food item, but our goal will remain the same: to do the best we can to combat the deadly, crippling diseases condition atherosclerosis.
Based on the results of this survey we can conclude that the opinion on GMOs is relatively mixed within our community but that the price of these products has the ability to influence whether or not people are included to purchase it. Further, on the subject of heart disease in our community, it seemed that an astounding majority of people would eat the same amount of red meat regardless of whether or not the effects of eating red meat were eliminated. This was one of the primary goals of this part of the survey, as we had significant concern about whether or not a production of a probiotic to eliminate the heart disease-causing effects of red meat would encourage greater consumption of red meat, which has its own sea of issues. But in our endeavors, it is pretty clear that most people, in our community, are unlikely to change their eating habits, therefore won't consume more red meat, in the event that a drug, like a probiotic to break down TMA, were to exist. There are some discrepancies with this data, namely in where we collected this data and how we collected this data. First, we mostly collected data at our local grocery stores and distributed the digital surveys to people that live in Del Mar and San Diego, which means that the results that we achieved, at most, predict the opinion of people in those areas. Further, a majority of our survey results were from the online survey that we distributed via email and text message. The fact that survey takers had the option to opt out of taking survey leaves a large gap of unknowns, as we know nothing about the demographic of people who chose not to take the survey. Regardless, through this survey were able to get a better understanding of the general opinion and the effects of GMOs in our community as well how our drug could potentially impact peoples' diets and people with heart disease.
