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 following picture beside) 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
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Time
7/22
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Location
Bio-Lab
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Consultant
Dr. Wu
Fitness Coach
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Time
7/29
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Location
Smooth Fitness Studio
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Consultant
Coach Wei Qian-Fu
Nutritionist
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Time
9/11
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Location
McDonald's
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Consultant
Nutritionist Liu Guan-Ling
Outreach
Science, not only the lab, but into into the public
The Poll
Time: 9/16
Location:
Taichung City
Participants:
The public
Walk into the public!
S&T Month
Time: 5/22, 23, 25
Location:
Lecture Hall & Bio-Lab
Participants:
Mingdao students
iGEM in Campus!
Elementary School
Time: 9/22
Location:
Chiao-Jen Elementary School
Participants:
Kids
Sow Seed of Science
Drink Sampling
Time: 10/3
Location:
Mingdao High School
Participants:
Mingdao staff and students
Just Drink It!
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 Zhu Wen-Shen
Not limited to laboratory, we make business approach
Enterprise Outreach
Visit to Chung Mei Pharmaceutical Co., Ltd.
Part Name [Number]:
- Pcar, synthetic promoter repressed by CRP [BBa_K861171]
- RBS + PhlF repressor + terminator [BBa_K1725041]
- PhlF repressible promoter + strong RBS + GFP [BBa_K1725001]
Triggering the suicide circuit
In our case of sugar hijacking, ideally, the tiny, living “agents” are supposed to kill themselves in the story to make a happy ending. Therefore, we introduced a glucose responsive elements and a repressor circuit to be connected to suicide genes (lysis and NucA).
Promoter Pcar [BBa_K861171] is a glucose responsive promoter created by WHU-China in 2012. Pcar promoter region was de novo designed with overlapping of CRP and RNA polymerase binding site. The initiation of transcription by RNA polymerase may be hindered by the binding of CRP, which occurs at the formation of cAMP-CRP complex in the low concentration of glucose. In other words, when the amount of glucose is high enough, Pcar would be turned on after the leaving of CPR due to the low concentration of cAMP, and vice versa.
PhlF repressor system contains the repressor PhlF [BBa_K1725041] and the PhlF repressible promoter [BBa_K1725001] created by Glasgow in 2015. PhlF could repress GFP fluorescence intensity by 83-fold according to the study of Glasgow’s work.
Glucose responsive repressor device
We’ve innovated this year a novel glucose responsive repressor system (Pcar-wRBS-PhlF-T-Pr-sRBS-GFP/pSB1C3 [BBa_K2230012]) by connecting these two system and extend the function of them.
Please go to DEMONSTRATION section below to check the function of this device in our experimental results.
- - REFERENCE -
- 1. Amount of colicin release in Escherichia coli is regulated by lysis gene expression of the colicin E2 operon. PLoS One. 2015;10(3):e0119124.
- 2. Characterization of a nuclease produced by Staphylococcus aureus. J Biol Chem. 1967;242(5):1016-20.
Conclusion
It took us quite a long time to think about how to respond to the questions above, since last time we had a meetup with NCKU_Tainan, one of their team members had already ask us a pretty tough question similar like these problems that we barely couldn’t answer, “aren’t you guys supporting the world to consume more sugar?” At first, we kind of think that they are right. After all, there’s no denying that these questions just hit the weak point of our project and present the realistic society problems our product might bring, but after a fierce argument between our teammates, we repositioned our project and have the conclusion in addition below :
Indeed. It is actually the way that gets straight to the point the most. However, it’s just like the reason why you 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 doctors’ judgment. 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.
So we come to the third question. In fact, this situation won’t happen 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. Thank The Mingdao Voice for helping us passionately. It is this bilateral communication between science and humanities and social science that makes our project more specific and more mature to be closer to come true.
© iGEM Mingdao 2017. Design: Kevin Li. All rights reserved.