Team:Uppsala/HP/Silver
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Human practices of iGEM Uppsala 2017 has started to reach various aspects, especially in the ethics and open collaboration. These studies supported our team expanding the perspective in doing synthetic biology in the last summer. Started by participating #OpenHack Uppsala 2017, we got some insights to develop an idea in building a project. Then, as a follow up and annual meeting, we involved in the Nordic iGEM Conference in Copenhagen, Denmark. Not only focusing in the main project, the team also started to focus in compiling ethics assessments and documents. These were conducted by contacting and discussing the intellectual property rights issue with Uppsala Innovation Centre, constructing the ethics book assessment for synthetic biology experiment, starting the online ethics discussion with 16 other iGEM teams 2017 around the world and organizing the panel discussion with iGEM Stockholm team 2017 in Stockholm. The team also had the opportunity to engage with exchange students from China (what university/ institution?). iGEM Uppsala 2017 team also attended the Global Community Bio Summit in Boston (September 2017). By conducting and being involved in these forums or events, the team reached out many people who have very diverse background. Not only participated or hosted the events, the iGEM Uppsala 2017 also introduced this year projects in various events.
In details, here, we provide what we did in the summer!
Reaching out to companies was done by an email containing a pamphlet and a brief introduction about our team, ambitions and goals. This was followed up with a phone call some days after to be certain that the companies received our email and if they had any further questions about us, our project and if possible a corporation between the Uppsala iGEM team 2017 and these companies. Scilife lab, Lindvalls, eLABJournal, Mercodia sponsored Uppsala iGEM team 2017 with gene sequencing, free access to eLabJournal and money for the project.
While preparing the actual lab project for the summer, we from iGEM Uppsala kept stumbling upon the general “Ethics” topic. We felt we lacked the proper tools to fully and properly investigate an issue that is so important and yet so neglected in biological sciences. So we came up with the idea of writing ethical guidelines ourselves, where the experience from our academic background came together into four parts of ethical question sets that we find important to address: Work ethics, intellectual property, biosafety and social responsibility.
We consulted Heidi Howards from the Centre for Research Ethics and Bioethics and to our delight she agreed on helping us with her professional input for setting up guidelines. Our ambition is to motivate each and every iGEM team to accept their manifold ethical responsibilities and be able to state an elaborate declaration regarding their specific work. We want to present a pamphlet that introduces these four types of ethics every researcher will be confronted with and summarized them into questions that every team, in our opinion, should be able to answer. By this, iGEM Uppsala wants to contribute to the need of fully responsible researchers and a dearly needed open discussion.
To improve our work, we held an online discussion with 15 other iGEM teams, where we could test our drafted questions and were lucky to receive great feedback, allowing us to develop the topic further. We also held a Reddit AMA to answer user questions regarding our specific topic and, as expected, were also confronted with ethical questions that the non-scientific audience might have. We incorporated every input we could collect and are proud to present the results of a summer’s work on bioethics.
On this occasion, iGEM Uppsala sucessfully reached out to the other iGEM teams to discuss ethics related issues. iGEM Uppsala hold three topics discussion which are genetic engineering, social responsibility and intellectual property rights (IPR). The discussions were conducting online through Google Hangouts and being broadcasted as a live session. From the discussions, iGEM Uppsala achieved a lot of insight from 15 other iGEM teams (iGEM ETH Zurich, iGEM Groningen, iGEM Lund, iGEM UiOslo, iGEM NAWI Graz, iGEM Chalmers Gothenburg, iGEM USyd, iGEM USP-Brazil, iGEM Toronto, iGEM Peshawar, iGEM Bielefeld-CeBiTec, iGEM CSU, iGEM Wageningen, iGEM Technion, iGEM DTU-Denmark, and iGEM Grenoble). The discussion could be seen here:
A panel discussion was planned and fulfilled as a contribution between iGEM Uppsala 2017 and iGEM Stockholm 2017. The discussion took place in Stockholm and three guest speakers plus one moderator took part in the event. Anthony Forster, a researcher at Uppsala University, was one of the guest speakers. He leads a group that is researching RNA, protein synthesis and applications thereof (synthetic biology). Another speaker was Cecile van der Vlugt, a member of Safety committee of iGEM. She is also a researcher at “National Institute for Public Health and the Environment” in Utrecht, Netherlands. Her background is in the field of biology and biotechnology and is nowadays working with environmental risk assessment and biosecurity. The last speaker was Mona Hagi, a member of Green Youth of Sweden Party, where she works as the Environmental Policy Spokeswoman. She is currently a student at Stockholm University and speaks about climate change and environmental issues. Heidi Howard was the moderator of the event. She has a Master's degree in Bioethics and works with research on ethical, legal and social aspects of; direct-to-consumer genetic testing, public health genomics, genomic medicine, among others.
The purpose of the event was to enlighten different points of views on ethics about synthetic biology and to spread knowledge about synthetic biology. During the debate, the audience had the opportunity to ask the panelists their own questions. This was a very successful event that was appreciated by everyone involved.
The pathway attempted to express crocin from Zeaxanthin involves three steps. Zeaxanthin is first transformed into crocetin dialdehyde through catalysis by the carotenoid cleavage dioxygenase CCD2. The enzyme CaCCD2 was proven by Ahrazem et. al (9) to parallel crocin accumulation and it has previously been shown that CCD2 is the key enzyme responsible for the production of saffron apocarotenoids, cleaving the 7, 8 and 70, 80 double bonds adjacent to a 3-OHb-ionone ring converting zeaxanthin to crocetin dialdehyde (9).
The pathway attempted to express crocin from Zeaxanthin involves three steps. Zeaxanthin is first transformed into crocetin dialdehyde through catalysis by the carotenoid cleavage dioxygenase CCD2. The enzyme CaCCD2 was proven by Ahrazem et. al (9) to parallel crocin accumulation and it has previously been shown that CCD2 is the key enzyme responsible for the production of saffron apocarotenoids, cleaving the 7, 8 and 70, 80 double bonds adjacent to a 3-OHb-ionone ring converting zeaxanthin to crocetin dialdehyde (9).
The pathway attempted to express crocin from Zeaxanthin involves three steps. Zeaxanthin is first transformed into crocetin dialdehyde through catalysis by the carotenoid cleavage dioxygenase CCD2. The enzyme CaCCD2 was proven by Ahrazem et. al (9) to parallel crocin accumulation and it has previously been shown that CCD2 is the key enzyme responsible for the production of saffron apocarotenoids, cleaving the 7, 8 and 70, 80 double bonds adjacent to a 3-OHb-ionone ring converting zeaxanthin to crocetin dialdehyde (9).
The pathway attempted to express crocin from Zeaxanthin involves three steps. Zeaxanthin is first transformed into crocetin dialdehyde through catalysis by the carotenoid cleavage dioxygenase CCD2. The enzyme CaCCD2 was proven by Ahrazem et. al (9) to parallel crocin accumulation and it has previously been shown that CCD2 is the key enzyme responsible for the production of saffron apocarotenoids, cleaving the 7, 8 and 70, 80 double bonds adjacent to a 3-OHb-ionone ring converting zeaxanthin to crocetin dialdehyde (9).
The pathway attempted to express crocin from Zeaxanthin involves three steps. Zeaxanthin is first transformed into crocetin dialdehyde through catalysis by the carotenoid cleavage dioxygenase CCD2. The enzyme CaCCD2 was proven by Ahrazem et. al (9) to parallel crocin accumulation and it has previously been shown that CCD2 is the key enzyme responsible for the production of saffron apocarotenoids, cleaving the 7, 8 and 70, 80 double bonds adjacent to a 3-OHb-ionone ring converting zeaxanthin to crocetin dialdehyde (9).
The pathway attempted to express crocin from Zeaxanthin involves three steps. Zeaxanthin is first transformed into crocetin dialdehyde through catalysis by the carotenoid cleavage dioxygenase CCD2. The enzyme CaCCD2 was proven by Ahrazem et. al (9) to parallel crocin accumulation and it has previously been shown that CCD2 is the key enzyme responsible for the production of saffron apocarotenoids, cleaving the 7, 8 and 70, 80 double bonds adjacent to a 3-OHb-ionone ring converting zeaxanthin to crocetin dialdehyde (9).
The pathway attempted to express crocin from Zeaxanthin involves three steps. Zeaxanthin is first transformed into crocetin dialdehyde through catalysis by the carotenoid cleavage dioxygenase CCD2. The enzyme CaCCD2 was proven by Ahrazem et. al (9) to parallel crocin accumulation and it has previously been shown that CCD2 is the key enzyme responsible for the production of saffron apocarotenoids, cleaving the 7, 8 and 70, 80 double bonds adjacent to a 3-OHb-ionone ring converting zeaxanthin to crocetin dialdehyde (9).
The pathway attempted to express crocin from Zeaxanthin involves three steps. Zeaxanthin is first transformed into crocetin dialdehyde through catalysis by the carotenoid cleavage dioxygenase CCD2. The enzyme CaCCD2 was proven by Ahrazem et. al (9) to parallel crocin accumulation and it has previously been shown that CCD2 is the key enzyme responsible for the production of saffron apocarotenoids, cleaving the 7, 8 and 70, 80 double bonds adjacent to a 3-OHb-ionone ring converting zeaxanthin to crocetin dialdehyde (9).
