Team:OUC-China/HP/Gold Integrated

Gold

We have d a carried out a full human practice this year！It can be summed up into four perspectives, inspired by society, contacts with society and feedback to society as well as a communication and cooperation section.

Inspired by society

Through the work of human practice, we did plenty of research about Enteromorpha's current condition, application, and related study. The results can feedback to our lab and help modify our project designs.

We conducted a full investigation and analyzed the practical significance, feasibility, and development potential of our projects. To be specific, our work can be divided into two sections: investigating the social and environmental issues lies beneath our project, and adjusting our emphasis of the project according to our research and analyzation.

The social and environmental issues

We have a full investigation of the background of the project: the cause of the Enteromorpha outbreak, the current situation of Enteromorpha outbreak, the application and utilization, the monitoring and forcasting, as well as local people's understanding of Enteromorpha's outbreak. To learn more about its advanced study, we also went to the First Institute of Oceanography, IOCAS, Qingdao Seawin Biotech Group and other places like that to dig deeper of Enteromorpha. There in IOCAS, we acquired knowledge of the influencing factor and reason for Enteromorpha outbreak. In the Qingdao Seawin Group, we volunteered in the processing workshop of the Enteromorpha and learn about the physical pretreatment necessary for our Enteromorpha residue utilization.

Current Situation

Through the investigation, we know that the cause of Enteromorpha outbreak in Qingdao is mainly the excessive discharge of aquaculture waste water from coastal farms. At present, the amount of salvaged Enteromorpha annually is over 70000 tons, which fluctuates slightly on a high level over years. After drying, crushing and other physical pretreatment, Enteromorpha residue is grinded into powder. The polysaccharidesutilization is then extracted from the powder, leaving a second-round residue as fertilizer for farmland. In another word, the utilization rate of Enteromorpha is quite low, with only a little potential exploited.

Causes of outbreak

The huge amount of Enteromorpha in Qingdao's coastal area is mainly formed in the Shoal of northern Jiangsu where there is abundance of local aquaculture, and drifts from south to north into the coastline of Yellow Sea (about 10 kilometers a day).

The main reasons affecting the distribution of Enteromorpha include: the impact of other algae on its growth, the water temperature, the salinity and the nutrients in nearby sea.

Monitoring, forecasting and controling

The North Sea Forecast center of SOA monitors the distribution of Enteromorpha in the Yellow Sea and East China Sea by means of remote satellite sensing. Monitoring data on June 28, 2017 showed that the green tide distributed in over 20,000 square kilometers, covering an area of about 187 square kilometers.

After summarizing all the information collected, from the location of the green tide to theocean current that may affect this area, we can obtain the time-shift information of the green tide patches in the next 72 hours and draw a forecast warning map for the green tide with the support of supercomputer.

Utilization status

The annual salvage of floating algae begins in June and ends in August, during which the company will treat it with mature and complete processing system and produce different levels of Enteromorpha. The daily salvage of Enteromorpha must be treated in time and mustn’t be stored to avoid rotting.

The production is mainly used for foddering and extracting trehalose. Enteromorpha powder is also known to be used as soil conditioner, which improves soil quality by adjusting its pH value and advocating green agriculture.

Feasibility analysis and improvement

At first, we assumed to utilize a kind of engineered cells to degrade cellulose and hemicellulose to ethanol inside Enteromorpha, and to produce cellulase and hemicellulose with our surface display system. Therefore, in February, we came to Beijing University of Chemical Technology to consult Prof. Lihai Fan, an expert in the field of making good use of cellulose, about how to improve our design. Consequently, we found that the metabolic burden of the engineered yeast will be severe and that the degradation efficiency will be low if we only use one kind of cells.

Then, we made a decision that we divide the whole project into two procedures including using enzyme to pretreat the cellulose and hemicellulose into cellodextrin and xylose and using our engineered cells to produce ethanol. At last, we choose four enzyme used in pretreat β-1, 4-Nechemu, β-glycoside, β-dextran, inner β-dextran enzyme.

Contacts by society

We linked our projects to real production！

To combine our projects with real production, we visited Qingdao Seawin Group (currently one of the biggest companies in the country carrying out Enteromorpha Salvage and roughing) and established a partnership with them. At the same time, their research and development staff helped assess the prospect of our project and thought highly of it.

Combination with real production

We introduce our project, using cellulose and hemicellulose from algae residue to produce alcohol, to research staffs of Qingdao Seawin Biotech Group and the principle of the group present their main industry—exploitation of trehalose.

As volunteers, we came to the product workshop in their industrial base and knew about the whole process of utilizing the Enteromorpha. After that, the researchers assessed our project and gave out a suggestion that can industrialize our ideas: we need to create a complete biological treatment scheme—from residue to alcohol, explore fermentation condition and optimize our engineered cells.

We will stay in touch with Seawin Biotech over a long term, hoping that our project will be industrialized in the future.

In addition, to spread our ideas and promote the influence of synthetic biology, we carried out a thorough research and started our science popularization work!

Research and publicity work

To make more people aware of our project, we conduct a thorough investigation and science popularization!

(1)In the form of questionnaire
We submit questionnaire on the Internet and collect information from various stages of society. Our target includes residents near the seaside and tourists from other places. We wonder whether they know the cause of Enteromorpha outbreak and how they plan to make use of Enteromorpha residue. To our surprise, we received 658 copies of questionnaire in all and among most of our informants there is generally a poor understanding of Enteromorpha.

(2)In the form of science popularization brochure
Through our investigation, we believe there is an urgent need for science popularization. So we designed the brochure and held some lectures. By leading them to collect Enteromorpha from the seaside and explaining to them the cause, current situation and utilization of Enteromorpha, we called on citizens to protect water environment and reduce the amount of outbreaking algae from the source. If everyone lend a hand, our city will certainly makes a better future! Meanwhile, along with our project, we show to the public the charming synthetic biology, which can be used as a useful tool to solve the problems around us!

The first three pictures is for us to all ages, each occupation's dissemination of science popularization brochure, carries on the propaganda science populariza-tion.

The last picture is about coastal intertidal zone of the collection of Enteromorpha.

Feedback to society

To give more feedback to society, we proceeded a creative education work!

Believing that algae outbreak caused by water pollution do not exist only in our locality, we investigated such environmental problems worldwide by distributing questionnaires in iGEM communities, consulting iGEM teams around the world, searching for relevant research institutes, and making hot maps of it. We hope that there will be more people understanding this kind of environmental problems, aware of its possible applications, thus enhance the protection degree. We also sent the information to Qingdao Seawin Group and related research institutes to assist in their work.

What's more, education! Since we have had a more innovative conception of synthetic biology and scientific thinking, we spent half a year designing and creating a comic book of synthetic biology, which talks about the biological model of synthetic biology in the way of a series of vivid cartoon stories. We want to make more people understand synthetic biology and love synthetic biology!

Also, we cooperated with many other universities and organized summer camps for primary and secondary school students to spread our thoughts. We introduced our work to young people through social software like WeChat, and even helped iGEM organizing committee apply for social accounts in China Sina Weibo, which is one of the most popular social media in China. We sincerely hope that more people in our country can get to know about iGEM and synthetic biology!

See more details in our Education page.

Communication and cooperation

This year, our team participated in the 3rd Synthetic Biology Young Scholar Forum at Institute of Plant Physiology and Ecology, SIBS, CAS from July 1st to July 2nd, 2017.

In August this year, our team went to Fujian province of China to participate in the China regional iGEM Exchange Meeting (CCiC), a total of nearly 50 Chinese teams participated. We communicated with each other, displayed our posters and also explained our own project. At the same time, we understand the forefront of the field of synthetic biology. In the final project display and poster selection, we won the Best poster award!

While we were communicating, we got many useful advices from other teams and experts, so that we can improve our project.