Team:Mingdao/HP/Silver

iGEM Human Practice

Overview

"Human Practices is the study of how your work affects the world, and how the world affects your work." — Peter Carr, Director of Judging. What’s Human practice? It is not just a work  to confirm and strengthen what we think is right. Instead, we should learn to share our knowledge with the world. We can’t just instill our personal cognition into others, nor can we blindly believe in whatever others say. All in all, human practice is all about “gain, give and mutual interaction”.

First, we build up a system constructed by the three topics below: Project, Us and the World. What we found is that our activities can actually made up a comprehensive interaction (refer to the picture above) For example, we “gain” professional suggestions from experts in various fields, which have made us think of repositioning our project; To conduct educating, we “give” what we know to those who are laymen in synthetic biology and sugar controlling. Other examples of give and gain also includes marketing and sponsorships. It is also necessary that we set up mutual pathways for knowledges, which are also known as meetups, collaborations and cross-domain communications. Totaling up all of them, we’ve excellently completed human practice.

To achieve our goal, we consult experts in different areas of study

Expert Consultation

Nephrologist

  • Time

    7/22

  • Location

    Bio-Lab

  • Consultant

    Dr. Wu

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Nepthrologist

Taiwan has the reputation of “the kingdom of Hem dialysis”. Yes, this is apparently not a thing we should be proud of. A huge sum of money is spent on this problem every year. But, you probably don’t know that a huge ratio of these cases are caused by neither drug abuse nor consuming too much salty food. Instead, diabetes is what may leads to kidney diseases. So, we invited Dr. Wu from the division of nephrology to tell us about the negative effects of diabetes. 

 In the interview, he mentioned that due to hyperglycemia, HHNK and DKA, which may cause headache, nausea, or even drive people into coma, is often found in people with diabetes. Furthermore, hyperglycemia can also cause the filtration in the glomerular to accelerate, which leads to its hypertrophy. As the function of kidney is gradually damaged, it can no longer eliminate the deleterious substances from our body. With urea and creatinine surging, a person could eventually end up in renal failure. From above, we can get a conclusion that diabetes is surely a thorny chronic disease that we should be cautious of.

But, Dr. Wu also said that each part of the endocrine system in our body have its own balance mechanism. It doesn’t make any sense that you can prevent diabetes by just having a non-sugar diet since the mechanism of diabetes is far more complicated than we can envisage.

“Why not orient your product to the purpose of losing weight?” He told us. For those who love confections and for those in the meantime yearning to stay in a great stature, how they can reduce the consumption of sugar is sure to be a topic of significant importance. As long as the effect of our product is testified, welfare is sure to be brought to the society. However, he also gave us a warning. Hypoglycemia, which may put a man to death in a very short time, is what we should face prudently. What he said, again, make us realize the very importance of the suicide control system designed in our product.

  After the interview with Dr. Wu, we had a thorough discussion. Yes, exactly, it is comparatively difficult to control the concentration of blood glucose. Therefore, We decided to position the main aim of our project to weight losing, and thus, we’re soon heading for another interview with a fitness instructor,whose work is related to weight control.

 

Fitness Coach

  • Time

    7/29

  • Location

    Smooth Fitness Studio

  • Consultant

    Coach Wei Qian-Fu

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Coach

 

Nutritionist

  • Time

    9/11

  • Location

    McDonald's

  • Consultant

    Nutritionist Liu Guan-Ling

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Nutritionist

Motivation
When visiting the fitness coach, he suggested that we also consult a nutritionist, assuming that the answers agreed by different professions may be somewhat different. Based on the recommendations of the fitness coach, we found a nutritionist from Cheng Ching Hospital, hoping to get the answer that is beneficial to our project.

Highlight
  1. Processed sugar intake accounted for a person's daily calories required 10%
  2. Excessive diet can hurt the body
  3. The amount of calories required for a day minus about 400 calories is the most appropriate calorie needed for dieting
  4. Fat is also one of the main causes of obesity
  5. Note the control of blood sugar

Conclusion
After this interview, we found that the point of discussion nutritionist and fitness coach stand are similar in many ways : for instance, going on diet should not be excessive, controlling  food and drink is important. These are complementary to what we want to do. This interview also let us adjust our project in order to support the public in pursue of a healthy and better life.

 

Outreach

Science, not only the lab, but into the public


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The Poll

Time:     9/16

Location:
   Taichung City

Participants:
The public

Walk into the public!

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The Poll

 

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S&T Month

Time:     5/22, 23, 25

Location:
   Lecture Hall & Bio-Lab

Participants:
Mingdao students

iGEM in Campus!

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S&T month

S&T Month is a tech activity hold by Mingdao annually. In the period time of five weeks, teachers and students trained in Physics, Chemical, Earth science, Biology and iGEM lead the other students to have an inside look into the world of science. 2017 Mingdao Team arranged two days of experiment and one day of a lecture. It is because iGEM still remains unfamiliar to them that the registration is quite enthusiastic. Such an optimistic start it is our campaign on iGEM has.  


 The first experiment is plasmid DNA extraction. After explaining the concept of it, we divided them into six groups, and chose a leader from our team members for every group. Most of the students had never used pipette before, which made them tense but eager to try. After all, what we students usually use are always droppers, beakers…and so on. 

  During the experiment day, we showed them our newly-opened-up lab and had them take turn operating at the same time. They all felt it cool and funny to extract the plasmid, and showed more interest in the experiment, electrophoresis, the next day. Not only did they ask questions enthusiastically, but they were more skilled because of the practices the day before.

As for the lecture on the third day, we told them more about what exactly Molecular biology is, and we invited a senior who had engaged in iGEM last year shared his experience and what he learned in iGEM. 

This activity gives middle school students a basic idea of Molecular biology. Moreover, it helps increase iGEM’s popularity as well. It is really killing two birds with one stone. 

 

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Elementary School

Time:     9/22

Location:

Chiao-Jen Elementary School

Participants:
Kids

Sow Seed of Science

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Elementary School Promotion


After S&T Month, we decided to extend our educate range to elementary school students. To let more people know the spirit of iGEM, we went to an elementary school, Chiao-Jen, to teach students there some basic concept of synthetic biology and introduce iGEM to them.

   We prepared a game for them and a bag of candy as reward, making it easier to understand what we want to express. Every team had one million dollars to invest in the genetically modified product. In the meanwhile, we mixed some fundamental idea of the synthetic biology into the game. Then, we explained the relationship between DNA and gene briefly. To our surprise, there was even a little boy asking us our opinion on GM foods! 

In this activity, we find It is the passionate interaction students react to you that what the most enjoyable moment of teaching is.  It was their passionate participation that made this activity succeed.

 

Monterosso

Drink Sampling

Time:     10/3

Location:

Mingdao High School

Participants:

Mingdao staff and students

Just Drink It!

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Drink Sampling

 


Food and Drug Administration

Time : 9/27

Location : TFDA Office Building

Participant : Section Manager Zhou


Food Industry Research and Development Institute

Time : 9/29

Location : FIRDI Research Building

Participant : Doctor Wen Shen Chu

We consider the public's voice

Public Survey

 

In order to understand our project affects the world and the world affects our project design, we did a series of surveys with School’s students, teachers and staffs, as well as team members’ friends and parents, and also for the public in using online Google forms. Totally more than 900 people participated in this survey. The graphs in the following are the results sorted into different genders and ages. In this survey, we wanted to see what people of different ages and of different genders prefer their sugar intake to be, what people will do to burn off the calories after drinking a bottle of Coke, and whether people like the idea of our genetically engineered product eating away the excess sugar. And also, we want to know how much do the public welcome our design and the engineered product.



  • - Conclusion -
  • We can see the survey shows that doesn’t intake of carbonated beverages of the female population is twice the male population, and, as people age, their preference of sugar is reduced. In this survey we can see that women take their health more seriously than men, and that men need more energy for their hard labor. Children are usually hyperactive and need a lot of energy, so we can see that children and younger people under the age of 18 have the highest consumption of sugar, but the older the person, the less energy is needed, so their consumption of sugar is lower than children.

    In the second part, we asked them what exercise would they do to burn off all the calories from a 500mL Cola. Most of them chose to jog for 30 minutes or ride a bike for an hour. After some research, we found out people would have to walk for two days without sleep to burn all those calories. However, due to the fact that we only have 24 hours in a day, and that we are sleeping ¼ of the 24 hours, we don’t have much extra time to exercise and burn off the calories. We concluded the survey by asking them that if they could have a probiotic that absorbs the sugar taken in, so they wouldn’t have to worry about their health, would they take it? 76 percent of people said that they would take the probiotic. We can see that people would prefer to use our solution than to take the time to exercise.

    According to research, in 2015, about 7 in 10 adults suffer the problem of being overweight or even being obese, and it is predicted that this problem will become apparent in more adults in the near future. One of the major factors that leads to obesity is “sugar”, which is found in beverages, desserts, and almost any kind of food. Thus, it is quite difficult not to absorb an excessive amount of sugar in our daily lives. In the hopes of preventing our bodies from absorbing too much glucose, our team aims to engineer bacteria that absorbs glucose more efficiently. Our team constructed active glucose transporters on the membrane of E.coli, enabling the glucose uptake to become faster than intestine cells. On the other hand, our team has designed a suicide circuit ensuring the bacteria won’t absorb all the sugar so that the body can get an adequate amount of sugar.

Science that benefits reality

Cross Domain Integration

Forum - The Mingdao Voice

Not limited to laboratory, we make business approach

Enterprise Outreach

Visit to Chung Mei Pharmaceutical Co., Ltd.

Introduction

Chung Mei Pharmaceutical Co., Ltd. has a long history in medical production and marketing. Established in 1926, Chung Mei provides several medical drugs for patients or sub-healthy people. More specifically, its services includes a wide range of over-the-counter medicines and consumer healthcare products.

Motivation

During our last time’s meet-up with Doctor Chu in (FIRDI), we discussed our design of modeling with him . However, the main research in FIRDI is about upstream technology and he is not proficient in the design of products, so he suggested that we may get what we need from medicine producers. With contacts and preparations, we successfully paid a visit to the CEO Lin and the manager in Chung Mei.

Highlights

  1. We should choose the lactobacillus which is low colonization rate, thus we do not need to add suicide circuit to our lactobacillus. 
  2. It is important that choosing the good food additions for lactobacillus.
  3. We need to make sure that our product is acid proof but will melt in our intestine.

Conclusion

After having discussion with the CHUNG MEI’s CEO Mr. Lin, we thought that is too hard to model our product. Therefore, we will not temporally take modeling into consideration. Furthermore, they also gave us some useful ideas. we can choose the low colonization rate lactobacillus and every kind of bacterium likes different parts of intestine, so we have to focus on whether our lactobacillus grow up at the front part of the intestine. To sum up, we can sure that our lactobacillus can absorb the maximum amount of sugar.
Market Analysis

 

Since there are also many products used to lose weight, we search it on the internet and use the table to compare the differences between the medicine(Only two kinds of medicine, orlistat and lorcaserin, were allowed by government to use to lose weight in Taiwan now)and goods(Here, we choose the chitin and liposuction).

After looking for the above-mentioned table, we find that our product has many advantage. Not only does our project has no side effect, but it can also be used for everyone. However, all the products have to pass the examination of legalizing, if they want to hit the market. That's why we visited FDA.

Conclusion






After everything, it finally comes to a conclusion.


It took us quite a long time to reach a consensus on the position of our project, since we had been asked a similar question when having a meetup with NCKU_Tainan, “Aren’t you guys supporting the world to consume more sugar?” After all, there’s no denying that there ARE problems about social values that should be concerned. After a fierce argument between our teammates, we repositioned our project and have the reflection as well below :


 

Indeed. Avoiding eating sugar is definitely the way that gets straight to the point the most. However, it’s just like the reason why most people prefer Mosquito-repellent lotion to wearing long sleeves and trousers when hanging out with friends in a hot day. You don’t like to sweat and become smelly, so you make the choice. Let’s have another example. If you have motion sickness, the most simple and direct way to solve it is get off the car, but that’s too inconvenient. As a result, you take motion sickness pills instead. The two examples convey the same meaning. Sugar is not merely an essential nutrient in our normal life, but it is also added into snacks, afternoon tea… and so on that people enjoy for relaxation. That is, avoiding eating sugar may probably not be very efficient to reach the goal of losing weight. At this moment, our bacteria come into use.


But here comes a question. Eating sugar without absorbing it? People will definitely run into sugar’s hug rather than resist the desire.  

  Yes. Thus, instead of the medicines put on the shelf that everyone can purchase, our product will be prescription medicines for assistant purpose. Whether patients can take it to help control their weight or blood sugar depends on the doctors’ judgments. The customer base we set as target is mostly those who need to lose weight. By doing so, our product won’t be the permit to the heaven of sugar. In addition, as what the experts once said, excess is NEVER a right thing. The consequence will take its toll on the one who doesn’t cherish their body.  

As for the sugarcane-farmer exploitations, we are quite sure that this situation won’t happen. In fact, no matter whether our product is prescription medicines for assistant purpose. That is because the sugar nowadays we use is mostly Corn syrup. The growth of corn is all mechanized and at area of large scale of land, which is as they are like apples and oranges when it comes to sucrose farmers exploitation. That’s why most news about farmer exploitation focuses on cocoa beans or coffee beans instead of sucrose.  

There are always two sides to one coin. Everything has its own defect no matter how perfect it is. Facing the fault, what we should do is manage to solve it in preference to leaving it to the unsure factors in the future. Thanks to the Mingdao Voice and all the experts for helping us passionately. It is the bilateral communication between science, humanities and social science that makes our project more specific and more mature to be closer to come true.

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