Team:WHU-China/HP/Silver

• Project
  • Overview
  • Background
  • Introduction
  • Designs
  • Experiments
  • Results
• Parts
  • Description
  • Basic
  • Composite
• Interlab
  • Results
  • Calibration
  • CellMeasurement
• Notebook
• Model
  • Modeling
  • Hardware
• Human Practice
  • Silver
  • Gold&Integrated
  • Engagement
• Safety
  • ProjectDesign
  • LabWork
• Team
  • Member
  • Attributions
  • Collaborations
• Achievement

Silver

• 1 Safety
• 2 Necessity
•      2.1 Government sector:
•      2.2 Interview
•      2.3 Questionnaire
•      2.4 Water sample analysis
• 3 Education

    Before setting about our project, we had to think over many troublesome but necessary questions. For instance, is it safe and efficient in accordance with Safe Policies? Are there any advantages of it when compared to those pre-existed wastewater treatment devices? What impact will it have on people’s lives? iGEMers have been doing a great many of meaningful Human Practices(HPs) over the 14 years around the world. Therefore, to figure these out and improve our project’s feasibility, we planned some HPs mainly in the light of safety and necessity. We put them into effect as follows.

Safety

    First, our team members all have been trained after Guidance of Student Experiments formulated by TCEB (Teaching Centre of Experimental Biology, Wuhan University), including how to use chemicals and instruments safely and how to manipulate organisms properly.

    Second, Prof. Chen Yu of College of Life Sciences, Wuhan University(CLS-WHU) had a significant talk with us. He reminded us of the importance of biosafety, including experimental safety and laboratory safety. And we took part in the Lab Safety Exhibition held by CLS-WHU and had a better understanding of Biosafety.

    Third, to propagandize Biosafety to as many people as possible, we collaborated with other 10 iGEM teams to make videos about Biosafety and have uploaded these videos to Bilibili.

    Fourth, since our project has many similarities with that of JLU-iGEM, we communicated a lot about how to improve each other’s project and make the whole wastewater treatment a more practical and environmental friendly one.

    Fifth, we got lots of inspirations and pieces of advice from other iGEM teams and professors about how to get rid of the leaked bacteria in effluents with synthetic biological and industrial methods.

Necessity

1.Government sector:

    We managed to contact the branches of Environmental protection department of the People's Republic of China- Wuhan Environmental Protection Bureau(WEPB)and Hubei Environmental Protection Department(HEPD) to get some specific data of pollutants monitoring indicators for our modeling and figured out current regulations and laws about bacteria used in sewage treatment.

    We noticed that halogenated phenol was not an environmental indicator yet, but officers had realized the harm of this kind of pollutant and are considering to make it an indicator.

    Apart from it, we also surprisingly heard that there is almost no official law on that issue because biological methods are seldom used still. It strongly indicates that wastewater treatment is an urgent field requiring more attention for government management.

2.Interview

    In August, we had some interviews with many students from different schools in the street in Wuhan University to know public understanding on sewage treatment. What makes us astonishing is that only minority of them can say something about this necessary process to purify wastewater.

3.Questionnaire

    To make our project closer to ordinary people, we completed some investigation activities to know more about their environmental awareness, especially about industrial wastewater treatment.

    We made a questionnaire based on our project and let it out in three different places to make the results more dependable. These three places are New York, Helsinki and Wuhan University and the results have been summed up as follows.

　　You can download our questionnaire by clicking here.

    The data we've obtained in questionnaire is showing below:

    As we can see from the figures above, most people think that the city’s water pollution only has a slight change or even no change. Although almost half of our interviewee are students under 20 years old, but on the other hand, it indicates that many young people have been aware of the importance of wastewater treatment and water environment is in an emergency that feasible approaches should be conducted to deal with it. And we are also frustrated to find that only a small amount of people knows about halogenated phenols, which is a common but toxic pollutant in wastewater. But most people prefer to reduce the pollution by Biological treatment, and that is what we are going to do.

    Above all, we can see that most people are now holding the view that our environment is getting worse, but they don’t know the details of the pollutants, especially halogenated phenols. That tells us that we need to do more things on public education on details of pollution and in the meantime, it’s necessary to carry on our project.

    One of the questions is to collect team names from people. We collected the answers and drew this picture.

    All the names showed in the picture came from the interviewee and the more frequency the name shows in the picture; the higher votes it wins.

4.Water sample analysis

    To figure out water pollution state in Wuhan, which is a city famous for its lakes, we collect many samples in different sites to detect the level of halogenated phenols—— pollutants our engineered bacteria can break down.

    We chose many different sites in river area to figure out the relationship of pollution and human activities.

    Because the amount of halogenated phenols in natural water is too low to be detected exactly, even by HPLC-MS, we didn’t do the experimental work. However, from other indexes we can have a general view on pollution level and obviously, samples from those sites near residential area and factories are polluted unbelievably.

Education

    In June 11th, we got a chance to propagandize iGEM and our project to children in community.

    After delivering a speech about microorganisms, we instructed them to make three types of halogenated phenol models by foam board and stick models, ortho-position, meta position and para position. We taught the children to cut the cystosepiment into regular hexagons. The hexagon represents benzene. The balls and sticks are inserted at hexagonal angles as halogen atoms and hydroxyl groups.

    Then they were divided into two groups, competed and played the role of our engineered dehalogenation bacteria— break the bonds between halogen atoms and phenols. After the volunteers stood away from the head of two queues with equal models, they handed one model to each child, and the child needed to pull the balls representing halogen atoms away from cystosepiment representing phenols, then they had to run back to tail of the queue and hand the separated models to volunteers waiting there. Because our dehalogenase can function and break para-position halogenated phenols firstly, then para-position and ortho-position halogenated phenols, the children can only take para-position halogenated phenols firstly. One team who used the least time to breakdown the models would win. In fact, everyone in both teams was awarded with a delicate toy and felt a lot of fun. At the same time ,we successfully made people be familiar to our project as soon as possible.

    Through all these explorations, we drew the conclusion that the wastewater treatment is of significant importance and feasible and efficient solutions are urgently needed. Our project should do great benefits to the wastewater treatment if we make some optimizations to apply it in a more concrete way.