Human Practices
Synbio is just a S-Din away!
SYSU-Software 2017
Overview
During our project “S-Din”, we brainstormed many aspects concerning our project and took them into practices to confirm or to overturn our hypothesis. Then we tried to integrate them into our final project in order to improve the project functions and user experience.
At the beginning of our project, in order to get answers to questions about user needs, safety, software regulations and legal issues, we conducted numerous interviews with professionals working in related fields. They gave us useful and significant suggestions (Silver page). We have considered all comments from professionals and integrated them into our design of S-Din (Gold Integrated page). We conducted further user interviews and user needs analysis, promoted S-Din and synthetic biology to the public (Public Engagement page).
Please see our human practices highlights during the entire product development on our Gold and Integrated Human Practices page.
During the project, we brainstormed many aspects concerning our project. These aspects can be roughly divided into two basic problems:
- What advantages will our project have to raise scientists’ ideas, which may lead to a wonderful genetic design? Or what to raise ordinary bio-lovers’ interest, which may attract them to learn more about synthetic biology?
- What impacts will our project have in different fields of society?
Through discussions, interviews with professionals or scholars in different fields, and searching related policies, we had a better awareness of our project in the context of scientific inspiration, societal attention, safety and security, and legal considerations. These inspirations help us improve our S-Din a lot.
Interview with other iGEM teams and ordinary bio-lovers
Motivation
Every product (including a software) is designed for users' needs. We hope to learn about what problems other iGEM teams meet and to analyze what they need to solve their problems. What’s more, the intention of ordinary amateurs is also supposed to be taken into account.
Practices
This summer, we cooperated with SYSU-CHINA iGEM team in many activities in our campus. (See collaboration page) We also exchanged our ideas on Synthetic Biology and iGEM frequently.
One day, we conducted a discussion among members from us, SYSU-CHINA and SCAU-China, with the topic of data collection and integration. All participants agreed that data and information online is so scattered that we have to spend much time on collecting it and reusing it.
SYSU-CHINA hoped to solve this problem and put the hope on us software team. We regarded the fragmented data as a problem, too. So we started to conduct further investigations and interviews on it. More details can be found on our Integrated Human Practices page.
Figure 1. The discussion among SYSU-CHINA, SCAU-China and SYSU-Software.
At the same time, we chatted with some students who are interested in biology work. They told us, “We’ll like the software if it shows details of each bio-project, in a way easy to understand.”
Inspirations on our project
From our investigations and interviews, we found that an integrated database is very important for an iGEM team, also for a research group. Our software is supposed to establish such a database in a standard and easy-to-understand format. It will save one's time, which enables one to focus on his project ideas.
Studying the needs of biology labs
Motivation
Apart from iGEM teams, biology labs and other biotechnology institutes have more rights to speak from a genetic circuit design in papers to a practical experiment protocol in labs. It is also very interesting and exciting to meet them who will be most likely to be affected by our project imagine.
Practices
During the summer, we visited several biology laboratories of Sun Yat-sen University. Researchers warmly greeted us. Thanks to Prof. Lu Yongjun’s help, we finished our interlab task and wet-lab validation in his laboratory.
Figure2: Our team member Wang Ziwei is introducing our project idea to researchers of LU laboratory.
By talking with researchers working in the lab, we were surprised that lack of ideas is one of the common problems when they work on a synthetic biology project.
Since ideas are so significant to a project, where do researchers’ ideas usually come from? We did a small survey of researchers in several labs. Check Integrated Human Practices page.
We learned that the majority of researchers’ idea source is professional research articles and journals, they work before, but a novel idea may arouse from them if the researcher reuses their essence and aims to an accessible direction. However, each paper usually describes its design in the author’s own style and standard, which is usually hard to understand and absorb its design ideas for one’s own creative work.
Inspirations of our project
How to come up with an idea or to trigger one’s inspiration is a challenge for us, because “inspiration” is such an abstract concept, and is hard to measure. But hope is still alive: several related previous works may create a new idea. To find out related projects and to guide users to a clearer direction, are what we consider to achieve in our software.
Learning related policies
Motivation
To know more policies which may affect our project, and to discuss the questions we don't understand in policies.
Practices
We searched the related safety policies on iGEM website. We got together and discussed any problems if we couldn't understand the policies. Especially, we discussed the biosafety issues and different risk groups.
Inspirations on our project
The risk group of chassis is one of the safety standards to assess the chassis. Besides, whether a part is attached to "Red Flag" tag or not is another way iGEM uses. As an intact software for synthetic biology, S-Din should engage this function.
Figure3: We are discussing biology safety.
Consulting the Biosafety and Ethics Advisor
Motivation
How to guide the public attention to bioethics and biosafety is the urgent need before we design and develop our project. We are particularly concerned about one question:
What are biosafety risks easily ignored by us in a virtual genetic design in the computer?
Practices
In September, our team visited Prof. He Zhumei, a biosafety advisor from Biosafety Committee of Sun Yat-sen University. He not only researches biology but also devotes to guiding the public to bioethics and biosafety.
Figure 4: Prof. He Zhumei is explaining biosafety for us.
Prof. He was surprised by our visit. He said it was commendable for us to consult biosafety problems. Half an hour of happy communications, Prof. He patiently answered our confusion, and gives a lot of new aspects to think about the perspective of bioethics.
Prof. He emphasized the signification of biosafety awareness, and the real biosafety is supposed to be reflected in each step of the operation. As a development team for biology software, it is our responsibility to remind the users to follow safe and reliable design principles and to warn the users of dangerous operations. This proposal from Prof. He gave new inspiration to us.
Inspirations on our project
After the consult to Prof. He, we realized that we have more responsibilities of biosafety warning and guiding. What’s more, it would be better if we establish a way of communication with users. We’ll finish this goal by improving our interactive interface with users.
Figure 5: Group photo with Prof. He Zhumei.Thanks for giving advice on biosafety.
Consulting Microsoft staff about Information security
Motivation
We developed a software this year. The software may collect users’ information of interests, account, and activity on the website, and use the information for further functions. It’s our responsibility to protect user privacy. So we need to learn and follow relevant policies.
Practices
We consulted Mr. Li Yuzheng for related software policies and practices. Mr. Li majors in software, and has worked in Microsoft Research Asia. He told us that it is necessary to write a software statement, and show the statement to users when they first use our software. Only when users agree to provide their private information can our software collect and use it.
Figure 6: Photo of Mr. Li Yuzheng. Thanks for giving advice on software statements.
Inspirations on our project
According to Mr. Li's advice, we checked our software again, made sure that we never collect users' private information without agreements, and wrote a software statement with the help of legal professionals. See statements.
Consultation on intellectual property issues
Motivation
In our project, we hoped to collect and show some excellent iGEM projects posted on igem.org and research papers published in academic journals, in order to enrich our integrated database and offer better resources to users. Although we’re non-profit all the time, we are still supposed to consider intellectual property issues.
Practices
We consulted Prof. Li Yang on intellectual property issues. Prof. Li was from School of Law, Sun Yat-sen University, researching laws of intellectual property. We introduced the specifics of the literature citation to Prof. Li. He carefully helped us understand the citation terms and conditions, and explained how the paper license works. With his help, we make sure that we’re approval to use every paper and every iGEM project in our database.
Figure 7: Photo with Prof. Li Yang. Thanks for giving advice on intellectual property issues.
Inspirations on our project
The awareness of intellectual property is very critical for us, especially when we design an open website to share others’ papers and other achievements.
