Silver
Club
Synthetic Biology club were established in The Second High School Attached to Beijing Normal University by team numbers Weihang Guo and Haoyu Zhou. In the first club time, we presented our program and introduced the history and purpose of synthetic biology. After that, they showed their enthusiasm about synthetic biology and also were eager to participate into next year’s IGEM competition.
In order to let club members acquiring academic knowledge about synthetic biology and enjoying their study time, we asked for our instructor Ni’s suggestion to arrange curricular hours as well as experiments. Till now, we have taught about basic instruments in laboratory as well as the overall process about how to edit plasmid, including restriction enzyme, DNA polymerase and PCR. About experiments, after the training of laboratory safety, we instructed club numbers how to use pipettes and centrifuge. With the supervision and assistance of instructor Ni, club members made LB culture medium by themselves and coated the plated using E.coli.
About future activity, we plan to teach basic knowledge to all club members as soon as possible and then focus 2018 IGEM experiments.
Fig1. This group photo was taken on Oct. 19th. In that class, we were talking about lab safety and how to use pipette and centrifuge.
Questionary Intro
Gut inflammation is a disease that infects a large number of people, and the public’s opinion and experience is important to our project. We therefore conducted a survey to gather information about people’s diets, opinions on probiotic treatments, and methods used in inflammation testing. This survey was conducted both online (via WeChat) and off-line (paper survey) in the Tsinghua Campus. In the end, we gathered and analyzed the answers from a total of 467 people.
Result
General information
Among the survey population there were more females (59%) than males (41%), but not in an unacceptable disequilibrium. The largest age group was the respondents under-eighteen (128) followed byrespondents between 41 and 50 (162). A large proportion of the survey respondents preferred light (40%) or spicy food (36%), while a smaller proportion liked fatty food (17%), and a still smaller proportion liked other kinds of taste. This result can be considered as reasonably representative of Asian (Chinese) people’s taste preferences.
Opinions about gut inflammation
As we turned the focus to their thoughts about intestinal health, we found out that most people (80%) would sometimes doubt or consider their intestinal health, while significantly fewer people would never think about or very frequently think about their intestinal health. As for determining intestinal health, many people tend to link intestinal health to defecation – they think regular defecation or unobstructed defecation means that their intestines are healthy. Somewhat fewer people think that good face complexion or not having diarrhea indicates healthy intestines, and relatively few people think that just not having a stomachache is a sign of health. When asked about the seriousness of gut inflammation in their opinion, most people said that diabetes, depression, cardiovascular diseases, and cancer would be more serious than gut inflammation, while fewer people thought that obesity is more serious. Comparatively few people thought that catching a cold is more serious than gut inflammation.
Their previous experience with gut inflammation
We next turned to ask about people’s previous experience with gut inflammation. About 80% of them have had gut inflammation less than three times, and surprisingly, 6% of the people we surveyed had it more than 10 times in their life. This made us consider that if we can cure gut inflammation with a single treatment, and safely keep the probiotic bacteria in patients’ intestines to prevent future inflammation, there would be a population that need it. An astonishing 35% of the survey respondents have had an examination in the hospital regarding gut inflammation, and the methods used in their examination (from the most frequent to the least frequent) were stool examination, blood testing, and colonoscopy. Moreover, an unexpectedly large proportion were administered some other methods except these three, which means that unconventional methods are being used in gut inflammation testing, and all of these might be our product’s future commercial competitors.
People’s opinions about our probiotic treatment method
In the end, we asked about their opinions and focus on detecting gut inflammation using probiotics. Their average rankings of importance (from most important to least important) of their considerations about probiotic detection were: safety of the product, degree of trauma to human body, sensibility, price, and the required time to obtain the result. From this, we can easily see that people put safety in the very first spot, the product’s quality (sensibility) the next, and then follows the cost, so that the most important thing for us would still be ensuring its safety. As we then set up the imaginary situation that there’s a method that can detect and cure gut inflammation at the same time, the majority of people said that they would consider it; thus, if we can further improve and perfect our bacteria and put them into commercial use, our treatment method would really resonate with the consumers. Then, as we asked about the price, about half the people said that their acceptable price would be under CNY 100 (around 15 US dollars). Therefore, in order to make our treatment practical, we must be able to produce it in a pretty cheap price range.
Figure 1: the gender of the people we surveyed.
Figure 2: the age of our participants.
Figure 3: participants’ taste preference.
Figure 4: Frequency of patients doubting their gut’s healthiness.
Figure 5: What do the participants think are the phenomenons of gut healthiness.
Figure 6: Which of the following do our participants think is more serious than gut inflammation.
Figure 7: The number of times that our patients had gut inflammation.
Figure 8: Have our participants ever had examinations in a hospital regarding gut inflammation?
Figure 9: (If the participants have had examinations in hospital about gut inflammation) What type of examination did they had?
Figure 10: If there is a new method f gut inflammation testing gut inflammation by taking gene-engineered probiotics, what would be their ranking of importance (from 1 to 5) of the following aspects? (These data are the average number of people’s rankings)
Figure 11: If the probiotic can not only examine gut inflammation, but also cure the inflammation, regulate the balance between bacteria in the gut, and enhance immunity, would our participants consider taking it?
Figure 12: What is our participants’ acceptable cost for a gut inflammation examination?
