Team:BHSF/Human Practices
Questionaire
Our team has already done a series of human practice activities including sending questionnaires, interviewing lipstick producers who used carminic acids while producing, giving lectures about our project in school, and organizing club in school to teach classmates about synthesis biology.
In July this year, we send questionnaires to our classmates and neighbors in order to learn about their opinion of using carminic acids in food and cosmetics. According to the result of questionnaire, 72.28% of the 202 respondents did not know that carminic acid had been widely used as red dye in daily life. After learning that carminic acid was extracted from insects, about 44.55% of the respondents answered that they would not accept food contain carminic acid. Then, we designed a question that “Would you be more willing to accept products that contain carminic acid which was produced by bacteria?” We expected that respondents would prefer carminic acid that was produced by bacteria to carminic acid that was extracted from insects. However, 62.33% of the respondents answered that using bacteria to produce carminic acid would not make them to accept it. Also, some respondents expressed their worries about bio-safety of the product. We realized that we should use a kind of bacteria that is beneficial for human in order to make it more attractive for customers. Thus, we used E.coli Nissle 1917 as our engineering bacteria. However, after using E.coli as engineer bacteria, many of the respondents still did not accept e.coli as engineer bacteria. After discussion with our team members, we decided to use yeast as engineer bacteria. When telling our respondents that we use the bacteria that are used to produce bread and wine, most of respondents accepted the process.
What is the market value of carminic acid?
“ The world is producing carminic acid that worth 10 million US dollars annually. Pure carminic acid is expensive in present market, and each kilogram of carminic acid costs about 1000 US dollars. Among the world, South American countries are the biggest producers of carminic acid, and Peru produce 80% of the carminic acid in the world. However, because market demand of carminic acid is huge, and the process of producing carminic acid is complex, the producing of carminic acid could not reach the demand of the market.”
Which specific fields in daily life are carminic acid being used?
“Carminic acid is widely used in daily life, and it is mainly used in food producing and cosmetic producing. In food producing field, carminic acid is mainly used to produce ketchup and meet products like hams. In cosmetic producing field, carminic acid is used to produce lipstick and eye shadow.”
Is there any substitutions of carminic acid?
“Possible substitutions include Monascus color and betanin.”
What are the advantages and disadvantages of using Monasucs and Betanin as red pigment in producing cosmetics and food products?
“The most stable pigment among these three chemical substances is carminic acid. However, it also has lots of disadvantages. For one, it is much more expensive than other pigments, and the price of carminic acid would be several times of other pigments. Another disadvantage is that people who have religious believes would not accept animal or insect products. For example, a few years ago, Starbucks used carminic acid as food additives in beverages, and due to the fact that many consumers have religious beliefs, or could not accept the fact that insect products are in their beverage, consumers boycotted beverages that contain carminic acid. In addition, for people who are susceptible to allergies, insect proteins in carminic acid would cause serious allergies. Monascus color and Betanin also have both pros and cons. Both of these two pigments are much cheaper and have a smaller chance of causing allergies. However, these two pigments are not stable, they would decompose and lose color when being heated.
Lectures
In addition, we have been continuously giving lectures about our project in schools and communities to make people realize that bacteria products are not always harmful to humans. We gave lectures in Tsinghua University High School to introduce synthesis biology to students in Grade 9.
In October, we communicated with KEYSTONE, i-Bowu, QHFZ, BCU, RDFZ and introduced our program to them. Also, we helped to solve each others’ problems on experiment and wiki. To be more specific, we were reminded by students in KEYSTONE that we need to focus more on the costs of synthesizing biology and how to test whether we produce our goal products successfully.
