Team:ECNUAS/Entrepreneurship

ECNUAS

Entrepreneurship-Silent Spring

1 Abstract

1.1 Background

Atrazine is the most widely used herbicide in the world today. In the middle of the last century, it was developed and put into production. The excellent herbicidal efficacy and low price of atrazine make it widely popularized.

Researches have shown that atrazine pollution has a gender reversal effect on frogs, and it also has a negative effect on some other organisms that interfere with growth and reproduction.

Inhalation of a small amount of atrazine can cause physical discomfort, such as nausea and dizziness; if you stay in an environment contaminated by atrazine for a long time, the function of your immune system and lymphatic system is very likely to be impaired. High-dose atrazine may cause cancer.

To summarize, atrazine is toxic and easily enters the human body through food. It is dangerous to the human nervous system, immune system, and reproductive system. Thus, it is also currently listed as an international environmental priority control pollutant.

1.2 Product Introduction

It is a cell-free atrazine biosensor enabling users to detect cyanuric acid (a derivative of atrazine) fast, easily, conveniently at an affordable price.

2 Product Analysis

2.1 Supply & Competitors:

2.1.1 Immunoassay detection

Among the methods for atrazine detection, immunoassay has many advantages such as simplicity, rapidity, high sensitivity, strong specificity, and large number of processed samples, which is suitable for on-site screening. At present, there are commercially available ELISA kits and rapid test strips used in the detection of atrazine, but due to its high sensitivity, the operating gap of each specimen is small, it is easy to influence each other (contamination) and produce false positive results. Therefore, for positive specimens, appropriate methods should be used to recheck to reduce false positives, generally only as negative confirmation.

2.1.2 Chromatographic detection

Chromatographic analysis has high separation efficiency, high sensitivity, fast analysis speed, wide application range, and high instrumentation. It is suitable for laboratory research. It is an internationally recognized trusted quantitative technology. It has made significant progress in recent years; the major shortcoming is that samples Pre-processing is complicated.

2.1.3 Others’ biosensor detection

Compared with the above-mentioned methods, the biosensor detection method that we used for atrazine has its unique advantages, namely portability, automation, integration, high sensitivity, high selectivity, low cost, real-time, and simple. In the market, there is already one kind of biosensor can detect atrazine, which is based on the activity of one specific enzyme. Since atrazine can inhibit the activity of this enzyme, when users pour water into the biosensor, they can observe whether the enzyme is working or not to distinguish how much atrazine exist in the water. However, compared to our products, this kind of biosensor is quite expensive and difficult to buy.

2.2 SWOT analysis

FIGURE 2.1

3 Market and Marketing Analysis

3.1 Market size

Atrazine is widely used all over the world. For example, in China, atrazine is applied to 266,640 square kilometers per year and more than 95 percent of corn fields are sprayed with atrazine. Where atrazine has been used, it needs to be tested to see if its levels exceed the standard after use. So the main audience for our finished product is people work in agriculture and the corresponding environmental monitoring industry. Meanwhile, people who are caring about the environment quality can also use our products at home to test the levels of atrazine in their surroundings themselves.

3.2 Recent changes

FIGURE 1.2

In China, the use of herbicides with atrazine as the main ingredient is increasing year by year. Inevitably, there is a need for atrazine testing, so the demand for related products is also increasing.

3.3 Future expectation

We look forward to updating our products each year and finding easier, cheaper and faster ways to test. To enhance the user experience as much as possible.

3.4 Marketing strategy

3.4.1 Product

Our team is developing a less time-consuming, less expensive, and more sensitive cell-free atrazine biosensor. We test for cyanuric acid (a derivative of atrazine) by detecting its content.
The main idea of our team is using of genetically encoded biosensor to detect the concentration of CYA, which is a metabolite of the herbicide Atrazine. In this biosensor system, protein atzR is first expressed, which has been previously reported as a CYA binding protein and can regulate the promoter Pprovoin5. In the presence of CYA, atzR changes the binding conformation with promoter Pprovoin5 upon binding with CYA, so as to activate the expression of downstream reporter gene green fluorescent protein(GFP). The fluorescence signal of GFP can be detected by the fluorescence detector and the concentration of CYA can be determined by signal intensity. In this system, GFP can be further replaced by other visible chromogenic proteins, so as to realize the rapid visual detection of CYA.

3.4.2 Pricing

Since we aim at developing affordable atrazine detection device, we will consider about the competitors’ pricing in detail before determining our price, that is to say we will implement benchmarking pricing.
Initially we hope that the price of our final products will be at least 50% lower to our competitors, to attract clients.

3.4.3 Place

Atrazine is widely used in the farm field.The main goal of our product is to stop the transmissions of atrazine in a proper level at the beginning. So the most part of the demand of out products must be in the farm field. Thus, we have determined to distribute our products to farms. We will establish a business development department aiming at connecting with the administration departments of farms, through which we hope that our products could be distributed efficiently since the administrations usually have huge power to impact our end users, farm operators.
For the environment monitoring industry, we hope to connect with the related industry associations to get our products distributed.

3.4.4 Promotion

Promotion Channels:
1) Farm administration departments collaboration;
2) Online website
3) Online live show
4) Charity sales events.

4 Cost analysis

The total cost includes Innovation cost and sale cost
The innovation costs are shown below

4.1 Experimental equipment cost

- PCR Machine
- Centrifugal machine
- Electrophoresis apparatus
- Pipette
- Incubator
- Autoclave

4.2 Raw material cost

- Different types of buffers
- Different types of plasmids
- Different types of enzymes

4.3 Cost of labor

The sale costs are shown below
- Advertising cost
- Producing fare
- Biosensor production line
- Packing expense
- Transportation expense

5 Conclusion

To sum up, the harms which brought by atrazine to humans are obvious. Diarrhea, emesis and endocrine dyscrasia are all the illnesses it could bring to human bodies. However, we are confident that if our atrazine biosensor can be extensively used, people can all avoid the negative effects that atrazine causes.They don’t need obscure professional knowledge or skilled operational skills but can detect the atrazine fast and conveniently. With our product,a cell-free atrazine biosensor enabling users to detect cyanuric acid (a derivative of atrazine) all the people can have a better and healthier life.