Team:Uppsala/HP/Silver
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Human Practice is an important part of iGEM since it’s about visually bringing the projects outside the lab and thereby putting them in context with society and real world problems. Integration between science and the public is key for any development.
Since our team holds a special interest in ethics, that’s the core of our Human Practice work. We started off by doing a market analysis to see the potential market value. An ethics package was constructed by discussing ethical issues of our project with experts, talking to the iGEM community in webinars and by reaching out to general public in a panel discussion and by having lectures. Out of these parts we compiled ethical guidelines for iGEM teams. Other than this our team have participated different events to reach out to a lot of people with different backgrounds and talk about our project. These events are OpenHack in Uppsala, Nordic iGEM Conference in Copenhagen and Global Community Bio Summit in Boston. Our team also had the chance to engage with exchange students from universities in China.
So we wanted to produce crocin, but then what? Before going through with our project we wanted to make sure that we were actually doing something of worth, so we started off by doing a market analysis to confirm that there exists a market for crocin.
With the analysis we concluded that both crocetin and crocin are very expensive, since today the only way to get them are to extract them from saffron which in its turn is completely inefficient to grow and also Iran holds 95 % of the saffron production. That means that being able to produce the compounds synthetically could reduce the costs drastically. It’s hard to calculate exactly by how much since crocin is still very unexplored, but when comparing to a study done on cellulase enzymes we can estimate the a reduction of the price by 30% and furthermore a possible reduction of 85% in the industrial scale. These numbers definitely felt like reason to go ahead with the project.
You can read the entire market analysis here
While preparing the actual lab project for the summer, we kept stumbling upon the general “Ethics” topic. We felt that 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 down some helpful 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: Intellectual property, work ethics, biosafety with genetic engineering 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. All of this boiled down into a pamphlet that introduces these four types of ethics every researcher will be confronted with, and summarizes it with a few questions that every iGEM team, in our opinion, should be able to answer. By this we want to contribute to the need of responsible researchers and a dearly needed open discussion.
To improve our work, we held online discussions 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 in The Ethics Guide Book.
While creating The Ethics Guide Book we stated the importance of communication and addressing important ethics issues. So instead of only saying this, we decided to start an actual discussion. This was also a perfect opportunity to connect to other iGEM teams and thereby contribute to the community with collaborations.
Since iGEM teams are spread out all over the world we concluded that the best way to do this was over the internet. We sat up a structure for online discussions using Google Hangouts. We planned for three occasions, with topics based on the chapters in The Ethics Guide Book. All discussions were closely related to what we consider important to every team's work during iGEM, therefore relevant to each participating team and to further broaden the accessibility we decided to broadcast each session live making it possible for anyone that’s interested to follow the discussion and comment.
All three sessions can be found on our YouTube-page and the questions being addressed are from the correlating chapter in The Ethics Guide Book
From the discussions, iGEM Uppsala achieved a lot of insight from the 15 participating iGEM teams. Big thank you to 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. It was great to share thoughts with each other to receive new insight and perspectives. We brought a lot of it back and integrated it with our own project, especially in The Ethics Guide Book that the discussion questions were based off of.
A panel discussion was planned and fulfilled as a contribution between our team and iGEM Stockholm 2017. The discussion took place in Stockholm and three guest speakers 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 Heidi Howard, 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).
