Contact with the Ministry of Environmental Protection.

To find out whether the things we do is really useful to the world, we must first investigate the seriousness of the problem to be dealt with, so we visited the highest environmental authority in China's government departments: the Chinese Ministry of Environmental Protection. A functionary of the State Environmental Protection Department told us that Yangtze River whose water quality was the best of all the rivers in China had been polluted by heavy metals, and among 21 cities near the river, 6 of them's heavy metal accumulation percentage reached 65%. This result is not optimistic, so the control of heavy metal pollution is imminent.

Email from prof. Hongyan Qu.

Translation of the email.

the situation we saw in Sewage treatment plant - Pingdingshan Kangxing Environmental Protection Water Limited Company

Life sewage treatment plants used multiple-bacterial system to settle heavy metal down, to which our project could be utilized. But the leader told us that its ability to settle down the heavy metal was very low because these bacteria were intolerant of metals. Because China's sewage treatment plants generally do not have technology to deal with heavy metal, once the content of heavy metals in water exceeded the standard, treatment plant will stop all process and submit the sewage to the government, which will make the efficiency and the benefit of sewage treatment plant very low. If the sewage treatment plant have the genetically modified yeast we have done, they can have a higher efficiency.

China State science Dingshi environmental engineering CO.,LTD

And then we had a telephone conference with the doctoral of heavy metal processing company, he told us that the most common approach was using physical and chemical methods, biological method was not common because bacteria needed oxygen, nutrients and energy, which is a big cost. The most important thing is that there is no such high microbes with high resistance to heavy metal, so microbial methods were difficult to achieve, although it was friendly to the environment. So we introduced them our genetically modified SCRAMBLE strain and they showed a interest in our subject, and he told us that if our strain were able to achieve high resistance, it would be more environmental friendly and economical than physical and chemical methods.

Doctor Yi Wu

Our problem about safety is that, in order to obtain highly tolerant strains, we are using yeast with synthetic chromosome 10, which has many cre-loxp sites to make it mutate, so that if the artificial modified strains leak, they may be mating with the wild-type yeast, Their offspring may have the artificial chromosome. In this regard, we consulted some experts in this area.
Yi Wu
We asked Dr. Wu Yi, the main person responsible for the synthesis of chromosome 10, and he told us that it was possible to exchange genetic information with wild-type yeasts, but this was far from gene drive. He also recommended to us an article that they had published in the genome research on ethics and biosecurity. In the article, the writer emphasized the importance of biosecurity that you couldn't ignore even the smallest difference between synthetic phenotype and wild-type, but in the meanwhile, the writer believed the future of synthetic biology was bright. So we decided that we won't promote our project as an application but as a fully considered idea.

Jef.D.Boake is talking about Synthetic Biology .

On June 10th, Jef.D.Boake came to TianJin University to give a speech about Synthetic Biology. During the speech, our leader-Mingzhe Han asked him the ethical issues of SCRaMbLE, he answered that the future trends of SCRaMbLE were very likely to go in the higher biological direction, but at the present, many people might not be able to accept this kind of major breakthrough in synthetic biology. But with the time changes, maybe one day this could be acceptable even of great help for people. He also suggested us to do some investigations for our safety, comprehensive our project.