Team:SiCAU-China/HP/Gold Integrated
project
Model
Human Practices
Notebook
team
Collaborations
First event: Investigate the use of antibiotics in farm animals.
In order to learn much about the use of antibiotics in actual animal breeding, as well as the advantages and disadvantages for the most commonly used methods to detect antibiotic residue , we have a visit to the school's farm. Under the guidance of some graduate mentorships and administrators, we understand the current situations of the bases well, such as the sheep, pigs, cattle breeding base.
We first interviewed the graduate student who is responsible for the farm. He told us that the process of feeding cattle does not need antibiotics, due to that the cattle are ruminants and need gut microbes to help them digest fodder. When we talked about other animals fed in this farm, such as pig and sheep, he said the feeders generally use the antibiotic premix and the amount of antibiotics added in fodder varies with different animals. Normally, they will use method ELISA to detect antibiotic residues. But now this method exists many shortcomings especially the insensitive response and the long cycle.
Second event: Investigation of antibiotic residues and detection in the environment
We learned condition about the use of antibiotics in animal feed by taking an interview with an interviewer and visiting the Food and Drug Administration. Due to low prices of antibiotics, it is used a lot in the feeding of animals. Adding antibiotics to the fodder can inhibit growth of the pathogens in animals and reduce animal mortality. However, the problems of animal disease is getting more complicated and the situation of antibiotics residue becomes more serious. On the one hand, we need to spend a lot of energy to treat the difficult animal diseases. On the other hand , antibiotics residue flowed to the environment may cause a large number of resistant bacteria multiply, with polluting the surrounding water at the same time.
Now, using Liquid Chromatography to detect antibiotics is mainly applied, which costs high and takes a long time. Meanwhile, we exchanged our projects with the teachers and technical staffs. According to our survey results, using microbiological means to detect antibiotics has great significance, which reduces the reliance on precision instruments and lowers the detection costs significantly.
Third event: An investigation of antibiotic residues
This summer, we have designed a signal amplification system which uses microorganisms to achieve trace detection of antibiotics or other substances. And, we would like to know the public's attitudes towards the detection and prevention of antibiotics. Setting up an online questionnaire helped us learn more about antibiotics. From the survey results, we can find that it is necessary to detect antibiotics and we need to do more to strengthen public understanding of antibiotics. The statistical results are as follows:
1. What is your gender?
2. Do you often use antibiotics in your daily life?
3.Do you know the differences between tetracycline antibiotics and cephalosporins antibiotics?
4. Do you think you have had antibiotic abuse?
5. Describe your understanding of the current antibiotic residue in your daily life.
6. Describe your views and attitudes about antibiotic residues?
7. Do you know the existing means of antibiotic testing?
8. Do you think traceable substances are easy to detect?
9. How do you think about the use of engineered bacteria (no pathogenicity) to detect the antibiotic residues in the environment?
10. Do you want to use this method to detect antibiotic residues existing in our daily life, such as the food?
Fourth event: Share iGEM with freshman in SiCAU
We present Synthetic biology to biology professional students on professional courses every year. It is an opportunity to introduce this emerging subject to those students learning biology. There is no synthetic biology course in our school, but we hold to talk about interesting project designs, aiming to inspire more people to know synthetic biology and join it.
We introduce the history of synthetic biology development, the sophisticated design, and some meaningful projects, like using E. coli as a test tool to detect contaminants in the environment. We hope these efforts could promote people’s comprehension of synthetic biology.
This practice makes Synthetic biology come into more students’ vision no matter what they major in. More and more people are interested in Synthetic biology and join us in this way.
We introduce the history of synthetic biology development, the sophisticated design, and some meaningful projects, like using E. coli as a test tool to detect contaminants in the environment. We hope these efforts could promote people’s comprehension of synthetic biology.
This practice makes Synthetic biology come into more students’ vision no matter what they major in. More and more people are interested in Synthetic biology and join us in this way.
