Gold & Integrated

Investigation

Survey on Mosquito Eradication

Since we have started our entrepreneurship project, in order to improve our product and investigate the possible market acceptance of it, we designed a questionnaire about people’s opinion on mosquito eradication, mosquito controlling products and technological innovation in the field of mosquito control.

Main contents

Question 1: do you use mosquito eradication products?

Analysis:

81.46% of the respondents use mosquito eradication products, indicates that mosquito eradication products are well accepted by the public and the market is huge.

Question 3: do you pay attention to new innovative mosquito eradication products?

Analysis:

16.56% of the respondents always pay attention to new mosquito eradication products and 55.96% of them do it sometimes. These data indicate that new mosquito eradication products, like the product of ours, could be noticed by the public and have the potential to access to market.

Question 8: what do you think are the deficiencies of mosquito control products in the market?

Analysis:

Due to the results from question 8, inefficiency, inconvenience and less in variety are the three main problems of mosquito control products in the market. Therefore, in order to get the product of ours accepted by the market and public, we have to improve its efficiency and convenience.

Question 10: what’s your attitude towards the advancement of mosquito control technologies in the future?

Analysis:

55.3% of the respondents are expecting new and more advanced mosquito control products, which indicates that the product of ours could be accepted by the public as a new measure of mosquito control if it’s advanced enough.

GMO Survey

It is undeniable that the product of ours is an outcome of several genetic modification processes. In order to make our human practices more influential, and to make our product more widely accepted, we have to get a clue of how the public understand GMO and synthetic biology.

Main Content

Question 1: how much do you know about GMO？

Analysis:

79.61% (9.92% + 69.69%) of the respondents know GMO and 20.11% have heard of it, while only 0.28% of the respondents know nothing about GMO. These data indicate that GM technology is known and accepted by most of the respondents.

Question 2: Which one (or more than one) of the followings might be GM products found in the Chinese market?

Analysis:

This is a test about respondents’ knowledge on GMO. Except for maize, all of the products in the list could be GMO or GM products in China, but the number of volts for maize is the second highest (90.65%), and most people don't believe that cottons, beets, tobaccos, ppapaya and insulin could be GMO or produced by GMO. This suggests that the majority of the respondents are lacking of knowledge about GM technology and GMO.

Question 3: in what way do you think GMO could influence people’s health?

Analysis:

44.19% of the respondents believe that GMO is potentially harmful (meanwhile not beneficial at all) to human health, while 30.88% believe that GMO could bring both benefits and harm to human health. Which means the respondents were not fully informed about the truth of GMO, some of them don't know the benefits GMO could bring, and the others cannot hold a certain attitude on it. Therefore, it is our job to inform as much people as possible about the facts about GMO.

Question 8: What’s your attitude toward the researches in the field of transgenosis?

Analysis:

74.22% of the respondents support further researches in the field of transgenosis, which means transgenosis and GMO have the potential to be accepted by the majority of the public and the public wants to know more about GMO.

Leaflet Making

We made two leaflets that were used as educational and popularizational materials, on the two main focuses of our program, GMO and mosquito control. We recalled the concerns and questions of ours at the time we first met the issue of GMO and mosquito control. We combined these questions (which were solved during our learning in the lectures and extra courses) with the results of our questionnaire investigation, to design the contents of our leaflets.

GMO Leaflet

• What is GMO
• Market share
• Applications
• GM procedure and safety evaluation
• Chinese policies on GMO
• How GM technology solves practical problems
• Market demand
• FAQs

Mosquito Control Leaflet

• Introduction of mosquito
• Trivia about mosquito
• Mosquito borne diseases
• Mosquito eradication methods
• Mosquito repelling methods

Comprehensive Evaluation

Health

Reduce the possibility of people being infected with mosquito-borne infectious diseases like cholera and dengue, decrease death rate and reduce pressure on the medical system; therefore, more resources available for the treatment of other diseases.

Decrease death rate.

Antibiotic resistant genes used as markers in the lab might drift to other microbes, increasing the resistance of microbes toward antibiotics, reducing the effectiveness of antibiotic treatments.

Environment

Larvae of mosquito might develop drug resistance toward Mtx1 and Cry4Ba, making it more difficult to kill them, making many now available mosquito larvae killing products invalid.

Numerous of species occupy the same ecological niche as mosquitos, when the population of mosquitos is controlled, the predators that prey on mosquitos could choose other species to eat; therefore, the control of mosquito won’t affect the ecosystem.

Economic & Social

The presence of the product of ours in the market may reinforce the competition and bring pressure to other companies which product mosquito eradication products, and if we became dominant in the market, deployment issues in other companies.

After mosquitos are controlled, funds on mosquito control could be used in other more meaningful fields, like education, environmental protection and researches.

Risk Assessment

We used E. coli, a widely used non-pathogenic model organism, as our bioreactor to produce proteins Mtx1 and Cry4Ba. However, since we hope the product of ours could be put on the market, which means it would be distributed into the natural environment, we have to be sure that it is safe for everything except mosquito larvae.

We have thought about several problems that might occur, mainly from the aspects of environment and human health.

Antibiotic marker genes used in the lab might drift to other microbes, increasing the resistance of microbes toward antibiotics, reducing the effectiveness of antibiotic treatments. In order to reduce the genetic drift, we have conducted an entire set of strict lab rules and waste dispersal procedures to prevent any departure of living cells from the lab, therefore, prevent the drift of genes from our lab to the natural environment.