Human Practices Development

We have thought about the Human Practices since the very beginning of KILL XYL. We had drawn the limits of it and found out which actors were going to be involved in deciding our scientific approach. This way our project could be as adapted as possible to the factual needs of society.

Then, the more our project advanced and defined itself, the more we worked on the practical side of Human Practices.

First and foremost, safety is crucial in a lab. To work in synthetic biology, we asked ourselves about the consequences of our manipulation and the safety level of each part and organisms that we used. We also always made sure to work in the best conditions and we didn't experiment with P2 level organisms.

To integrate the farmer’s opinion, we contacted them and did surveys, first via the web and then in person, during events around agriculture. This approach helped us to figure out their needs and their thoughts, about Xylella fastidiosa and the communication around it.

Thanks to these surveys, we noticed that a product administered by injection was more than disabling for farmers because it was irreconcilable with a large cultivation surface. Consequently, given that it would not correspond to farmers, our Hardware team stopped its research about an injection system. Thus, we decided to administer our product by spraying or irrigation, provided it would penetrate the plant and be able to have an activity in it. To reply to this new interrogation, we took experiments on Arabidopsis thaliana to find out whether it can enter the plant.

One of the most important changes in our project design was partly due to farmers' opinion. Indeed, we understood that they did not feel comfortable with the idea of spreading phages in Nature. This drew our attention on legislation related to the use of phages. We deduced from the law that a product containing phages would be very hard to market because of its dangerousness. Both elements lead us to think our project differently. We met Ms Mireille Ansaldi, the research director of the phage cycle and bacteria metabolism in LCB CNRS, to find another solution to using a phage. We decided at this point to use a phage-like particle (instead of a phage) for its incapacity to replicate itself.

We also asked to advise to Mr Jacques Van Helden, professor in Aix-Marseille University in bioinformatics, genome analysis, and more specific analyses of regulatory sequences. He helped us to think about measures of the rate of production of our phage-like particle and to the way to realize these measures.

Finally, in order to get advice on the relevance of our project we contacted Ms Marie-Agnès Jacques, a X. fastidiosa specialist from the Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique(INRA). She warned us that we would be defined by the legislation as a GMO product. We then began a complete study of french’s and European's law, thanks to a collaboration with the Paris-Saclay team. This allowed us to see if our product could be categorized other than GMOs and if we will be able to sell it in France and in Europe. We wanted to make sure that our product, especially our phage-like particle as it is a GMO, was environmentally friendly and didn't pollute the soil or harm plant. To do so, we did test our phages in various conditions and compared our results to legal rates established by French and European institutions.

To sum up, our project grew permanently entwined with the human practices. Our various investigations about human practices called our project into question all the time. We changed our mind several times about different points and initiated additional experiments further to our research in Human Practices.