Team:YAU-China/Integrated-Human-Practices

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Integrated Human Practice

We are passionate to finish it. This is a group consisting of three graduate instructors and several graduate and undergraduate students that major 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. It provides a new idea for the destruction of biofilm caused by burn infection all over 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. We made lots of efforts and have completed some tasks to promote synthetic biology and the iGEM.

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 our team and combined existing conditions to get a highly feasible project. In the brainstorming session, each member fully presented their own idea and displayed with PPT. Everyone also put forward their own views and discussed with each other. We have received different ideas, such as biodegradable white garbage, formaldehyde detection, destruction of bacterial biofilm, and so on.

After intense discussions and instructor's guidance, we finally established a project to build an engineered bacteria to destroy bacterial biofilms.

Survey

After the project was established, 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 confirmed the research direction of the project to eliminate biofilm, and provided theoretical support for the development of our project.

In-depth Clinical Investigation

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 third-class 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 Yan' an University Affiliated Hospital 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 laboratory research and clinical treatment. He helps 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. We 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 isolation. He suggested us to develop a new therapeutic product similar to artificial dressings , which is a pioneering proposal for the application of our project product. 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 in this way, can we create a product with good efficacy. These valuable suggestions were quite helpful for our project experiment and application prospects. We express our sincere thanks to Dr. Ding. After the project was completed, we contacted Dr. Ding and reported the situation of our experiment with him. We express our sincere thanks to Dr. Ding. He confirmed our results and hopes that our project can be applied to the clinic after the development of the project. It will benefit all humanity society.

Exchange Meeting

During the whole project, we have been in close contact with XJTU-CHINA, NWU-China and SCU-China.Two exchange meetings were held in Xi 'an and Chengdu on July 19 and 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. They discovered the security vulnerabilities in the project and we 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 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 security mechanism in our project, which provided assistance for the experiment of our project.

CCiC

CCiC is an iGEMer exchange conference in China, organized by the CCiC Executive Committee and jointly organized by 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. Since its inception in 2017, the Executive Committee has been adhering to the spirit of “Serve the People” and is constantly trying to help the Chinese iGEM community from multiple perspectives.

On August 20, some members of our team went to Shenzhen to attend CCiC after a journey of more than 30 hours. We received a lot of suggestions on project security and model, which helped us make subsequent corrections. Meanwhile, we met Tianjin from Tianjin University, which laid a foundation for our future cooperation.