Team:UChile Biotec/HP/Gold Integrated

Gold Medal Human Practice

Expand your silver medal activity by demonstrating how you have integrated the problems investigated in the design and/or execution of your project.

Since we do not work with living beings our device results to be a totally safe artifact and friendly with the environment. We designed it depending on the possible users: fishermen, laboratories, and regulatory bodies being our alternative a tool that allows measuring in the field and in a comfortable and easy way levels of Saxitoxin, especially for those who are at sea for much of the day. We know, however, that at least in Chile, regulators will not want to change the method so drastically since, in the end, the mouse bioassay turns out to be effective. Its great disadvantages and this is what we hope will change the decision of these people, is its high cost, the ethical problem of using many mice and slowness. We also know that our artifact can be used in landing areas or processing plants with a screening and early detection role, as stated by Dr. Benjamín Suarez, from the Marine Toxins Laboratory of the University of Chile.

Although there are problems that we must face (for example the existence of DNAsas in the samples) the idea, and using the synthetic biology, is the design of more aptamers incorporated into our matrix in such a way that the analysis of the red tide is more complete. In the future, we hope to solve all possible problems, apply our synthetic biology workshop and take it to more schools and keep in touch with all regulatory bodies to continue optimizing our project that we know can improve the quality of life of many people.

For more information, please visit: Making the device, Meet the SynBio and SynBio Course.