Team:DTU-Denmark/Integrated Human Practices
Integrated Human Practices
A huge goal for our project has been to secure that it has the biggest impact possible. This has meant that we have been in contact with important stakeholders and their advice has shaped our approach and the path of the project.
Being the number one group of organism to industrially produce enzymes, filamentous fungi are exceptionally important to the everyday lives of many people even though they might not notice it.
LEAP started as a reaction to the extreme lack of resources to work with filamentous fungi and attempted to use synthetic biology to contribute to the list of tools necessary to work with these organisms.
Originally, the project aimed to make a promoter library for either filamentous fungi, yeast, moss, or maybe all three, but following discussions with several companies and scientists, the team decided to develop a software that enabled the creation of promoters that could be applied to any organism and tested the function of the software in Aspergilli.
Stakeholder Analysis
In March, the team looked into the impacts of the project on different stakeholders and therefore made a stakeholder analysis, as shown in figure 2.
This stakeholder analysis reveals that companies such as Novozymes, Zymergen, and Bolt Threads are among the most important to our project, both in interest and power. This means that their opinions should be managed closely. Additionally, researchers such as Jens Frisvad (DTU, Denmark), Jakob Blæsbjerg (DTU, Denmark), and Peter Richard (VTT, Finland) could benefit from our project, making them important stakeholders. Although other iGEM teams do not have a lot of power, their interest could nevertheless be great and they should, therefore, be well informed.
The public and the DTU BlueDot program will most likely not take much interest in the project as a promoter library can be a very technical concept and not immediately usable by non-specialists. However, as DTU BlueDot is a big sponsor of the team, they are important to keep satisfied.
Based on the stakeholder analysis, we decided to contact three different biotech companies; Novozymes, Zymergen, and Bolt Threads as all three companies work with genetically modified filamentous fungi. We asked them how our project could influence their work and for suggestions regarding the experiment.
We also reached out to several scientists, including Jakob Blæsbjerg from DTU and Peter Richard from VTT (Technical Research Centre) in Finland. They helped provide us with protocols and advice on how to grow the fungi and how to ensure reproducible and comparable results.
Even though the public is neither very powerful nor interested in the project according to our stakeholder analysis, we nevertheless decided to contact high schools in order to talk to young people about synthetic biology and its aspects as well as about our project and what good it can do in the world. We also partook in several events: The annual UNF (Ungdommens Naturvidenskabelige Forening) Biotech Camp; Science Expo, a large science fair in Copenhagen; and the annual Biotech Academy Camp in order to increase their knowledge and interest in a topic like synthetic biology. This is described further on Education and Engagement.
