Team:UPNAvarra Spain/Integrated Human Practices
Integrated Human Practices
CEIN visit
The 17th of June we decided to visit CEIN (European Center of Enterprises and Innovation in Navarre), one of the most important investigation business in our region Navarre. It is a center that helps local small projects or inspirations, giving different types of advisory and economical support. We decided to go there in order to obtain feedback for our project and so we presented different ideas to CEIN’s professionals like Marisol Gómez Fernández (professor at the Mathematics department in UPNA and worker at Movalsys) and Xabier Aláez Sarasibar (worker at InBIOT).
Some of the ideas we presented them were:
- The development of biosensors which will be able to detect heavy metals and nitrates.
- Using engineered bacterias to detect pathogenic agents.
- Using plants as biosensor to turn on/off streetlights.
We also had the chance to present iGEM to all the participants and talk with them about this great opportunity.
Pollution survey
One of the global aims of our project was to have a significant impact on our society, finding a simple and feasible way to solve a real environmental concern in our society. In order to know if we fulfilled our objective, we decided to write a survey and send it across our country. We got more than 300 answers distributed from every region in Spain, specially from Navarre (our Region) and Pais Vasco.
Before filling the survey, we explained to all the participants the aim of our project, since the general public may not know neither what synthetic biology is nor biosensors. The first question was focused on knowing the knowledge of the participants about this topic: only the 44% knew what biosensors are, against the 56%.
The next three questions were about pollution. We wanted to know the general public opinion about heavy metals and nitrate pollution, and, as we expected, we confirmed that the majority of the participants think that in our society there aren’t enough controls and that it’s a real problem nowadays.
Finally we have the two opinion questions, the most important ones. We wanted to know the different opinions about our project: we got a lot of positive feedback for our project! We also asked about the application of our biosensors to the real world: the 89% believe that it could be useful to fight against pollution and the 11% believe that it will be useful in a future.
From the survey, we conclude that our project fulfills our main goal: to find a way to solve a real environmental concern. The fight against pollution is a day a day topic that concerns everyone in our society, so it’s really gratifying for us knowing that we can help in such an important issue, working on what we like and learning more every day. You can read our survey here.
Figure 1. Do you think that this project could be useful to fight against pollution? Figure 2. Do you think that there are enough measures against pollution?
Water treaments survey
On August 28th the whole team went to the south of our region, Navarre, to get some water samples to test our biosensors in a real situation. During the trip we had the opportunity to talk with some workers from one of the biggest cooperative in Spain, AN Group.
First we went to a meat packing industry, there we talk with the responsible of the purification system of the water. The current method they have do detect heavy metals or nitrates pollution, is to use chemical analyses of the treated water once a month.
After that, we went to a greenhouse, from the same cooperative. This greenhouse is located in a region of Navarre, in danger due to the high concentration of nitrates. They use fertilizers in order to control the nitrates levels of the land: they make their own fertilizer according to the legal levels of nitrates, and once a month they send a sample of their irrigation water to a specialized laboratory.
With this results we confirmed that our project has a lot of potential in the agro-alimentary industry, since all the current water treatments for detecting heavy metals or nitrates are associated with chemical analyses. With our project we offer an alternative to these aggressive chemical analyses, by using this organic and faster solution.