Team:Aalto-Helsinki/Sweat Challenge
Sweat Challenge
Because dermcidin, which is the heart of our whole project, exists in human sweat, we decided to spread the word about the health benefits of sweating to encourage people to move and sweat more.
We set up a Sweat Challenge for other iGEM teams where we asked teams to take a picture of themselves doing some sweaty activities and to share it with us by using the hashtag #igemsweatchallenge. Our own team showed a good example by participating in the Espoon Rantamaraton running happening where we ran for 10 km and sweat a lot.
While we promoted our project and iGEM, we aimed to convey a message to the general public - Sweat is part of our natural thermoregulation and immune system.
As the saying goes, “Seeing is believing”, we wanted to collect sweat from people, analyze it quantitatively in the lab, and raise awareness among people that there are many important proteins and peptides secreted in sweat. In this way we wanted to open a dialogue between people to prove to them that sweat is not as bad as it is often perceived. We collected sweat samples from different people, aiming to quantify dermcidin levels in natural sweat and get deeper insights for our project. For this purpose, we collaborated with Tec-Chihuahua team from Mexico. We met with one of their team members as she was visiting Finland and we had a lot of fun during the sweat collection in sauna. You can read more about it from our Collaborations page.
We performed BCA assay to observe protein levels in sweat samples and found that a considerable amount of proteins is present in sweat.
We can see the proteins in our sweat samples beautifully colored as purple.
During the summer there was an article about the negative sides of sweating in the biggest Finnish newspaper Helsingin Sanomat. We decided to turn the discussion the other way around and write an opinion article about the health benefits of sweating and the antimicrobial peptide dermcidin. Our opinion article was published in Helsingin Sanomat, which is definitely one of the best channels to reach a wide range of people and get visibility.
