Team:CIEI-BJ/HP/Gold Integrated
In order to know the expectations of current mosquito repellent products in the market, we designed a questionnaire, and put it online and offline. Our questionnaire covered task-oriented questions from the often-used mosquito treatment methods, the subjective evaluation of the effectiveness, the concern about toxic substances, to the acceptance level of biosynthesized products. More aspects were considered through the design of our questionnaire. A questionnaire must cooperate with people. In the real-life scenario, we shortened the question down to 10 to ensure the effectiveness of the research. In China and oversea*, 807* peoples have answered the questionnaire. This questionnaire served as a lighthouse, providing information to potentially improve our project overall as well as guiding us to shape our project well. The results showed that most of the people are annoyed with the disgusting mosquitoes. From people’s feedback of our questionnaire, we also knew that toxin free and high effectiveness are considered as the most significant features of mosquito repellents by the public.
Fig 1 Purpose of using anti-mosquito products
Q9 Your Age/ Q4 The Main purpose of using mosquito repellents (Multiple Choice)
Avoid the mosquito borne diseases（e.g malaria）
Among the people aged 16 or older who polled , only 39% of them claimed that they are aware of the danger of mosquito-borne disease.
Fig. 2 Comments on effectiveness of products
Towards the current mosquito repellent products, only about half of the participators feel satisfied.
Fig. 3 Worry towards mosquito repellent product
Most participators have considered the negative effect of anti-mosquito products on humans, this means that potential consumers care about whether the product is poisonous.
In order to get some professional knowledge about taxonomy and ecophysiology of mosquitoes, the disease they transfers, and the specialized method people use to prevent mosquito-caused diseases, we went to the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention and consulted with the experts on July the 28th. The staff showed us the specimens of various kinds of mosquitoes and the mosquito capturing devices. From the conversation, we realized that the mainstream way of mosquito treatment is still toxic chemical or low dose of pesticides. The disadvantage is quite obvious: despite the mosquitoes could grow endurance through time, the chemicals would cause a devastation of the ecosystem while killing other species other than mosquito. Furthermore, the substances get metabolized in human body in most of the cases, especially for young children and the pregnant women, the harm of toxic like DEET could increase exponentially due to their special body condition. What’s more, there are several kinds of diseases spread by the mosquitoes, such as Malaria, Zika Virus and Yellow Fever. This experience gave us a different horizon to look at our problem. Other than information that are directly related to our product, we learnt much about the side knowledge about mosquitoes. To prevent the fatal mosquito-borne diseases from people’s life and keep people healthy, it is really important to produce a kind of mosquito repellent which is toxic free and effective.
Concluding from the questionnaire and our field trip to CDC, we knew that it is critical for a successful mosquito repellents to be nontoxic and effective. After elaborated research, we decided to design a genetic circuit to produce citronellol, which has totally zero toxin and can repel mosquito effectively.
We, CIEI-BJ, together with our sister team CIEI-China, set up CGEM Summit and invited another iGEM teams (HFLS-H2Z-HangZhou,RDFZ-China, BIT-China), predecessors iGEMers from Qinghua university , and four professors to our forum, aiming to share our research.
In the beginning, the four iGEM team shared their own research one by one and elaborated their idea and experiments. Then our instructor Mrs. Wang expressed her congratulations and expectations to our new generation who are highly possible to make great contributions to synthetic biology in the future. After this, Professor Chengqi from HangZhou ZC Bio-Sci/Tech Co. LTD shared his own experience when doing research as a biosynthesis scientist. In addition, Professor Lichun from Beijing Institute of Technology made a speech explaining the great significance to study synthetic biology and use it to solve global problems like famine. Moreover, Yinjin, one of the founders of Bluepha, shared his own experience as an iGEM team member with us. At last, Professor Zhang Hongxiang from Chinese Society of Biotechnology provided us with some suggestions on research and made a speech at the closing ceremony.
In this summit, we shared our research with each other and developed a further understanding of the great importance and multiple applications of synthetic biology. Thanks to iGEM, we became close friends with each other and we would work together to improve the world with biosynthesis technology!
Our team made several public speeches about our project in schools and at the corner of Xidan road in Beijing. Our main goal was to let the public know about synthetic biology and its various applications which could improve our living standards and environments. We also hoped to provide an idea, which was to use new technology to improve the world we are living in, to the public and let them pay more attention to the relationship between diseases from mosquitoes and public health. Moreover, we were sincerely expecting more people to join us so we could work together to make the world a better place with biosynthesis technology.
◆Everyone has to wear lab coat, rubber gloves, goggles, surgery mask when carrying out experiments.
◆Before every experiment, our teachers have informed us about the procedure and details of every step to ensure everybody is prepared for the experiment.
◆Everybody has to wash their hands completely before and after each experiment. In addition, everyone should use 70% alcohol to sterilize hands before entering every laminar flow.
◆Ensuring a sterile environment for experiments: keep Eppendorf tubes and pipettes free from unneeded bacteria or impurity.
◆Food and beverages are not allowed in labs.
◆Power off the equipment after the experiment, avoid fire.
◆Emergency equipment is well prepared and all of us understand clearly how to use them when we need.
◆Solid wastes should be put in solid waste cylinder, liquid wastes should be put in liquid waste cylinder.
◆E.coli used in our experiments is harmless to human body.
Since we already determined the topic of our project, the next step was to design our genetic circuit and did experiments. We first made a field trip to Tsinghua and Peking Universities in order to consult instructors and students from former iGEM teams. Besides, after we finished designing our circuit and most of our experiments in laboratories, we made an outdoor experiment to test the effectiveness of our citronellol.
Field Trip to Tsinghua and Peking Universities
On July 20th and 21st, 2017, our team took a field trip to Tsinghua University and Peking University to attend a meeting with instructors and students from former iGEM teams. We explained our project idea and told them that our desire was to save people from the daily struggle with mosquito without concerning about toxic ingredient, and most importantly, to work as a prevention of the fatal mosquito-borne diseases. They warmly offered several specific suggestions in our experiment design and human practice. For instance, they strongly suggested us to test the effectiveness of citronellol , which could give more supports to our entire project. After the communication, we had a pleasant dinner and appreciated their help. Then they offered their contact to us, looking forward to our future research.
Advised by students and instructors form Tsinghua and Peking Universities, we planned an outdoor test to check if our citronellol was really effective.
Because of limitations in the institutions where we carry out our experiments, we could not find enough mosquitoes to test the effectiveness of citronellol. Therefore, we reached out to the School of Pharmacy in Southern Medical University in Guangzhou and came in contact with Dr. Jiabao Xu. We bought the readily prepared citronellol and Southern Medical University provided us with the mosquitoes we needed. Dr. Xu provided us with some advice, and we decided to carry out two series of experiments. The first experiment was an experiment to apply citronellol directly on hand to see how many times mosquitoes would bite. The second experiment was to separate a mosquito cage in half and test how mosquitoes would be attracted to humans with the protection of citronellol. With the help of Southern Medical University and Dr. Xu, we were able to test citronellol's effectiveness in replelling mosquitoes.
According to the data collected from our experiment, we could tell that citronellol could repel mosquitoes effectively. And since our procedures to produce citronellol was environment-friendly, we were confident that our project could have a positive impact on alleviating diseases and bites from mosquitoes.
