Team:YAU-China/Human Practices

Team:YAU-CHINA/Description - 2019.igem.org

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Integrated Human Practice

Do all the enthusiasm for what we love. We are a group of graduate and undergraduate students consisting of three graduate instructors and majors in microbiology, plant biochemistry and molecular science, biological sciences, biotechnology, clinical medicine, software engineering, visual communication design and internet of things engineering. We are a group of happy ants working with passion and diligence. We bring together a lot of enthusiasms into work. Our goal is to make new treatments accessible to all burn-infected patients around the world. At the same time, we will devote our enthusiasm to our Human Practices in order to promote our work with practical actions. We hope more people can get to know our projects, synthetic biology, and iGEM. In this attitude, we have put lots of efforts and have completed some tasks to promote synthetic biology. And the iGEM contest.

Brainstorm

After breaking through the difficulties, our team was formally established in December 2018 our key task was to establish a viable project. To this end, we have brainstormed within the team and combined existing conditions to get a highly feasible project that is favored by everyone. In the brainstorming session, each member fully exerted his talents and presented his ideas and plans in the form of ppt. Everyone also put forward their own views and discussed with each other. In the solution proposed by everyone, we have received different feedback in the aspects of biodegradable white garbage, formaldehyde detection, control of water bloom and destruction of bacterial biofilm.

After intense discussions and guidance from the instructors, we finally established a project to build an engineered bacteria to destroy bacterial biofilms.

Survey

After the project was developed, we designed the questionnaire to investigate people's understanding towards biofilms, the degree of biofilm damage as well as the support of biotechnology in medical treatment.

Our survey audience came from different ages in all walks of life, and effectively filled up to 500 people. According to the survey results, nearly half of the people did not understand the biofilm at all. However, more than 70% of them were troubled by biofilms in their lives and work. Although the public does not know much about biotechnology, 81.1% still expressed support for the application of biotechnology in the field of medical treatment. Through this investigation, we have strengthened the research direction of the project to eliminate biofilm, and also provided theoretical support for the development of our project.

In-depth clinical

In the middle of the project, we met the bottleneck period. Then, we transferred our minds and visited the Yan' an University Affiliated Hospital and Yan' an People's Hospital. Yan' an University Affiliated Hospital and Yan' an People's Hospital are two comprehensive tertiary hospitals in Yan' an. They had medical treatment, teaching, scientific research, first aid, rehabilitation and preventive health care. Most of the doctors in the hospital are experts with many years of clinical experience, so we hope to get some effective experimental methods and inspiration here. In the morning of August 14th, we came to the Affiliated Hospital of Yan' an University and visited Dr. Hongbin Xue, the director of the Department of Burn and Plastic Surgery. After learning about the contents and intentions of our project, Dr. Xue first compared the difference between clinical treatment and clinical treatment. It has helped us improve the project background and put forward some security vulnerabilities in our project. We harvested a lot from it.

In the morning of September 11, we visited the Yan' an People's Hospital. I consulted Dr. Junjie Ding, the deputy director of the Department of Burn and Plastic Surgery, about the experimental aspects, and hoped to improve our experimental methods and prospects for the application of the project products. Dr. Ding suggested that the current clinical treatment methods were mostly simple physical methods and bacterial culture. We can use the project to build a new therapeutic product, similar to artificial dressing. He also introduced us to some appeared dressings. This was a groundbreaking recommendation for the application of our project products. In addition, Dr. Ding also put forward some views on our project. He said that, in consideration of the variation of engineering bacteria, we should combine the sterilization efficiency of engineering bacteria with the surface area of burn wounds. Only this can we create a product with good efficacy. These valuable suggestions were quite helpful for our project experiment and application prospects. I would like to express my sincere thanks to Dr. Ding. After the project was completed, we contacted Director Ding and reported the situation of our experiment with him. He confirmed our results, and hoped that our project can be applied to the clinic after the development of the project. It will benefit all humanity society.

Exchange meeting

Throughout the project, we have been in close contact with XJTU-CHINA, NWU-China and SCU-China. They were launched twice in Xi'an and Chengdu on July 19 and July 30 respectively.

The first meeting was organized by XJTU-CHINA, NWU-China and us at xi’ an Jiaotong University. During this meeting, our three schools learned about each other's projects and put forward their opinions and suggestions. We have discovered the security vulnerabilities in the project and have made revises.

The second meeting was that we went to Chengdu with NWU-China. We had an in-depth exchange with them. In this meeting, we knew and learned relevant experiences about SCU-China ingenious human practices project. It has accumulated methods and experiences for us to complete our human practices. At the same time, the two schools put forward some constructive suggestions for the suicide mechanism in our project, which provided assistance for the experimental part of our project.

CCIC

CCIC is the iGEMers exchange conference in China organized by the CCIC Executive Committee, it is held jointly with other organizations.

The CCIC Executive Committee is a mass and non-profit organization that promotes the concept of synthetic biology in China and the exchange of iGEM members. Their members are currently spread around the world. They are the members of the old iGEMers or former CCIC organizing committee with many years of iGEM experience. They also have iGEM regional ambassadors. Since its inception in 2017, the Executive Committee has been adhering to the spirit of “serving the people” and is constantly trying to help the Chinese iGEM community from multiple perspectives.

On August 20th, some members of our team went to the CCIC site in Shenzhen after taking train for 30 hours. After spending few days here, we got a lot of advices on project safety, project optimization and modeling. It provided support for our follow-up revise. We met Tianjin. It has pave the path for our cooperation.