Team:Tec-Chihuahua/HP/Gold

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HP Gold

Key outcomes

The intentions of our Human Practices were always to impact the project in a way that it would have a better and wider impact in the community through the focus of the legal, economic, and social factors.

We developed a Mexican Official Norm to fill the existing void in Mexican regulation which prevented us and everyone in the country from carrying out a project like ours with the appropriate standards to make it viable and environmentally safe. We made sure to validate the above through a theoretical Paper which contrasted the NOM with the actual Mexican regulation such as The General Law of Ecological Equilibrium and Protection to the Environment, Biosecurity Law of Genetically Modified Organisms, General Health Law, and most importantly with the international regulation with The Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety to the Convention on Biological Diversity. In order to give practical validity to the project, we resorted to two of the main governmental agencies in Mexico in the matter of environmental safety, SAGARPA, and SEMARNAT, to receive feedback and support, which later transformed to pivotal changes in our project including:

• The inclusion in our NOM of the creation of a Bioethical Committee formed by various governmental scientific research agencies like INIFAP, CIMESTAV, and schools like UNAM, that would evaluate the ethical considerations and viability of any synthetic biology product that develops in Mexico.

• SAGARPA gave us a really specific feedback that resulted in the creation of the second NOM which establishes a specific protocol of good practices for the chromosomal insertion of microorganisms of risk 2, according to the ABSA, by CRISPR-CAS9.

• Both SAGARPA and SEMARNAT made us implement the design of an alternative plasmid without antibiotic resistance in our protocol.

• The implementation of the protocol on the second NOM and the alternative plasmid without antibiotic resistance in the specific design of the genetic circuit for Erwinions.

• By recommendation of both governmental agencies the NOM´s will be proposed to the Mexican Government on its executive branch for the latter formal acceptance and publication.

On the other sector of our Human Practices, the economic one, we developed what would be the final product of our project, a biocontrol that doesn’t affect the microbiota where it is introduced, preserving the ecosystem, while getting what we want. We set forth a whole impact research in the economic field, with help of the Orion Technological Park, to discover the potential impact that our product would have in the local and national market by carrying out the specific study of the marketing competitors, key resources and activities, customer segment, value propositions, cost structure and revenue. By doing this we were able to present our product economic project to “La Norteñita” the apple-producing company with the largest amount of hectares in Latin America, to receive feedback and a potential partnership advice, that resulted into a concrete suggestion for us to include in our project like:

• To perform in vitro confrontations of wild Erwinia amylovora versus the genetically modified one to establish the effectiveness of the final product and to discover how long would it take for the complete inhibition to happen.

We were conscious that our Human Practices needed to make a big difference in the making of our project, and we achieved that by focusing on the practical effects and repercussions along with the necessities of our project in order for it to be potentially successful. The assessment made by the governmental agencies and the private company generated direct conclusions that made our product viable to exist in the current legal, social and economic environment in Mexico.

The whole process, validations and more is described insightfully at the Integrated Human Practices tab, which you can access by clicking here:

Integrated HP

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