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.
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.
