Difference between revisions of "Team:Aalto-Helsinki/Sweat Challenge"

Sweat Challenge

Because the dermcidin which is the heart of our whole project exist in human sweat we decided to spread the word about health benefits of sweating encourage people to move and sweat more.

We set up a Sweat Challenge for other iGEM teams where we asked teams to take a picture of them doing some sweaty activities and share it with us by using hastag #igemsweatchallenge. Our own team showed a good example by participating Espoon Rantamaraton running happening and ran 10km and sweat a lot.

One part of the sweat challenge was more research oriented. We collected sweat samples from different people, aiming to quantify Dermcidin levels in natural sweat and get deeper insights for our project. For this purpose, we collaborated with Tec-Chihuahua team from Mexico. We met with one of their team members as she was visiting Finland and we had a lot of fun during sweat collection. Although, we initially planned to perform ELISA test to quantify Dermcidin levels in human sweat, we only performed BCA assay to observe protein levels in sweat samples as we had limited time and synthetic Dermcidin peptide to use as a standard. You can read more about it from our Collaborations page.

While we promote our project and iGEM, we aimed to convey a message to public - Sweat is part of our natural thermoregulation and immune system.

As the saying goes, “Seeing is believing”, we wanted to collect sweat from people, analyse it quantitatively in lab and raise awareness among people that there are many important proteins and peptides secreted in sweat. In this way we wanted to open a dialogue between people to prove them that sweat is not all bad as it is often perceived. We collected sweat samples from different people to quantify total proteins and also aiming to quantify Dermcidin levels in natural sweat and get deeper insights for our project. For this purpose, we collaborated with Tec-Chihuahua team from Mexico. We met with one of their team members as she was visiting Finland and we had a lot of fun during sweat collection in sauna. You can read more about it from our Collaborations page.

We performed BCA assay to observe protein levels in sweat samples and found that considerable amount of proteins in present in sweat. We can see the proteins in our sweat samples beautifully lit up in purple.

During summer in biggest Finnish newspaper Helsingin Sanomat was an article about negative sides of sweating. We decided to turn the discussion other way around and write an opinion article about healthy benefits of sweating and antimicrobial dermcidin. Our opinion article was published in Helsingin Sanomat which is definitely one of the best channels to reach wide range of people and get a visibility.