Team:Potsdam/HP/Gold Integrated
Human practices integrated
iGEM is a generally scientific competition and most of the participants are therefore scientists. This is why probably every team spends a big part of their time on experimenting and receiving results, that are to be presented to other scientists. Having in mind that the projects are supposed to not only be scientific fun but really have a purpose and a vision behind, it is of very high importance to also get the rest of the world on board.
Information works best against frightful and misleading sciolism, hence we decided to invest much of our time in bringing our project close to non-scientific people. To give some examples: in schools we gave presentations to pupils and discussed contemporary topics, on the Potsdam Day of Science (a public street event in our area) we tried best to get in touch with people of all ages and we never missed an opportunity to spread enthusiasm about our hobby:
science.
The thoughts and worries of the people we talked to have been discussed in detail and later incorporated into the project design, if it was something we had not considered before. To give an example, someone approached us with the question if we knew how much plastic waste was produced in a lab and if we were planning to reduce this. It has been a fortunate coincidence that we were asked to take part in "iGEM goes green", a program arranged by iGEM Dresden.
A second thought that we had already planned for reasons of safety was to use inducible promoters. This way it would not be possible for our modified organisms to produce the substances whose genetic code we inserted into the genome in the outside world.
Besides to this face-to-face work outside we also investigated what impact our project could have on environment and society. The most important questions to us were:
- Where and how could our project be used in the future?
- What changes are necessary to provide this?
- Where and how could our project be misused?
- What can we do to prevent this?
Due to the fact that our project is assigned to basic research and can therefore not be directly transferred to daily use, it is hard to clearly answer those questions from today’s point of view.
We imagine both of our projects being used to produce several substances in industrial standards e.g. pharmaceuticals, food additives or other biotechnically fabricated materials – preferably faster and/or cheaper as before.
LLPS is the more promising approach because it is less synthesizing and cloning (time saving) and already proven to work in HeLa cells, E. coli and now in yeast[1][2].
To achieve this additional changes in the project design are needed, that link the enzymes involved in the substance’s pathway either to the droplet causing protein Ddx4 (LLPS) or to a therefor specifically designed sgRNA (for further information see our Vision).
If our project, that until now mostly consists of an idea, could be misused is hard to say. It depends on what someone is making out of it. Out of our own experiences with the project we can confirm, that it is not (yet) possible to secretly produce tons of harmful substances in a short time with our approach. A patent might help to keep control on what is happening with our idea, once adjusted to industrial standards.
[1] Anthony A. Hyman et al. (2014), Liquid-Liquid Phase Separation in Biology, Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics Dresden and Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems, Dresden, 39-58
[2] Nott et al. (2015), Phase Transition of a Disordered Nuage Protein Generates Environmentally Responsive Membraneless Organelles, Mol. Cell, 57, 936-947 4 Yuan A. H., Hochschild A. (2017).A bacterial global regulator forms a prion. Science355, 198–201
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