Team:Manchester/HP/Gold Integrated
Integrated Human Practices
Beyond the bench, the world educates us on ethics, sustainability, social justice, safety, security, environmental impact and intellectual property rights - information which further shapes the direction of our research. We have engaged with experts from different fields to make sure that our project and its execution can be responsible, safe and sustainable. In this page, we highlight specific interactions from stakeholders that have directly impacted and shaped different parts of the project. Click here to our silver Human Practice page to see the full list of different experts we engaged with!
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Water Industry
Exploring the water industry taught us a lot on how great scientific ideas may not be feasible in the real world. From the start of our journey, we thought about the water industry as a potential market for the implementation of our project in real life. However, we simply did not know the current state of the UK water industry and whether or not synthetic biology that incorporates genetically modified organisms would be accepted as an innovative solution, given how controversial it can be.
We talked to six different experts - five of which were from water companies - to learn and understand the current state of the water industry. The full list of our interactions can be found in our silver Human Practice page. The most important information that we gained from our interactions is that there are no barriers to innovation using synthetic biology and that regulations in the water industry are now more flexible in accommodating new innovation. As long as we can prove that our project is cheaper, reliable and safe to use, water companies will be interested. We have summarized our findings in an infographic that can be found here.
Now that we know the current state of the industry, we need to know how our project works in real life and how it can fulfill the necessary criteria to make it appealing to water companies. So we had a site visit to Davyhulme Treatment Works where we were shown the basic process of water treatment, from separation of sludge to water treatment through biological means through a tour around the site. Since Davyhulme does not treat phosphate, we asked for data about the wastewater they treated to provide us some realistic parameters on the expected concentration levels of phosphate.
After permission was granted, we were grateful to be given access to a small part of the data that is specifically about phosphate. We used this data in our continuous culture model to estimate the production cost of our bacteria and used Davyhulme as a real life scenario to estimate the cost of treating wastewater for a year. This allowed us to determine the economical feasibility of our project and also led to a discussion on alternative synthetic biology strategies that could be employed as a cost-reduction strategy.
Furthermore, we had a discussion with Sara Lyons, one of the technical managers of the site, in regards to the execution of our project in treating phosphate. Sara encouraged us to be more creative and to think about other ways our project can be used outside of the treatment plant. She explained to us how most of the phosphate usually originates from detergents and perhaps it might be more feasible if we can reduce the phosphate levels of the wastewater before it reaches the treatment plant and before it gets mixed up by other wastes. We discussed this idea with the rest of the team and thought about incorporating our project within dishwashers and washing machines. In this case, Phosphostore must work in an environment with high pH and high temperature. Therefore, we determined the viability of this idea by testing the thermo-stability of our PPK enzyme to see whether it can withstand high temperatures. Check out our experimental page to learn more!
Business Plan
While exploring the water industry, we decided to take an entrepreneurial approach with our project for human practice. We want to see how and where our project can be implemented in real life and the factors that we’ll have to address. We decided to tackle three factors which together consolidated our business plan: intellectual property, scale-up and legislation.
Intellectual Property: The paper that we based our project on cited a granted patent. Since none of our members had any knowledge on patent laws, we did not know how this may influence our project or our entry to the iGEM competition. We contacted Dr. Rick Watson from the University of Manchester Intellectual Property Office and Dr. Linda Kahl from the BioBrick Foundation to learn and discuss patent laws in the context of our project and the iGEM competition. From our discussion, we were able to understand our patent situation and learned how the BioBrick Foundation is addressing issues regarding intellectual property rights for the development of synthetic biology. We also researched further and evaluated the viability of patenting our project. We compiled all of our findings in a report which can be found here. From our exploration of intellectual property, we came to the conclusion to avoid EU and US markets in our business plan and to explore markets in other countries. This is because a big majority of biotechnology-associated patents are granted in the EU and US, including patents that are associated with our project. Thus, we would not have the freedom to operate in these two territories.
