Team:HZAU-China/Human Practices
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WELCOME TO HP PLANT!
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"How does the world affect us, and how do we affect the world?" We are always thinking and
practicing this question. In March 2021, we went to Wuhan 14th Middle School. It was surprise
that most of them showed great enthusiasm about iGEM. Some of them even write letters to talk
with us about subject design and how to be an iGEMer.
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It was essential for us to improve the interdisciplinarity of
our project through getting an insight into different research fields. In 07.2021，we went to
Wuhan Modong Pet Hospital. There, we had a discussion with Jindong Gao, who is the veterinarian
in that hospital.
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Communicating with other iGEM teams in meetups was an efficient way
for us to solve the problems we faced. In the different stages of our project, we had
meetups with different teams which sparked a lot of ideas encouragement.
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It was high time for us to have a discussion with history. So at
the freshman admissions event, we planned a sharing session called “HZA-iGEM Gold Award Tour”
with previous iGEMers.
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Francis established World Animal Day in order to advocate the
idea of "thanking the animals who give love to humanity”. It’s our responsibility to do
something for animals.
Human Practices
It was essential for us to improve the interdisciplinarity of our project through getting an insight into different research fields. We believed that without the discussions with the teams which we had a close cooperative relationship with, our project could not proceed smoothly. The interviews with people from different fields also helped us to reflect on the problems we faced during our work on our project.
Here, we demonstrate how different advice has helped us to shape the P.E.T today.
VIEWS FROM STAKEHOLDERS
Figure 1. The sources we get information and feedback from.
1.The users
It was true that surveys can provide with valuable information which can build our iGEM project’s design and impact. However，designing a reflective, responsible and responsive questionnaire was not easy for us. Therefore, in order to meet these requirements， we collected the views from different ages and held some face-to-face interviews. The results of our survey can be divided into two parts which are listed as followed.
About their traditional cognition
The first part of our survey aimed to learn the public’s cognitions about IBD and probiotics. It was a pity that most of them didn't know whether their dogs were suffering from IBD. What’s more, most of them did not use some probiotics with diagnostic function for their dogs. (Figure 2) So It was necessary for us to communicate with different groups about our project and IBD.
More information please click Education.
Figure 2. public traditional cognition
About their cares and worries
Without a general understanding about public’s requires and worries, it would be difficult for us to realize the transformation from laboratory to factory. In the early stage, we found the public prefer to improve dogs’ intestinal health by giving probiotic. Besides, we found that the aspect people care most are safety and convenience,so this is why we pay more attention on the safety part. (link safety).
The view of public also shapes the design of our hardware.
Figure 3. Public acceptance and worries about survey.
2.Pet Hospital
Wuhan Modong Pet Hospital
In 2021.07，we went to Wuhan Modong Pet Hospital (Figure 4,5). There, we had a discussion with Jindong Gao, who is the veterinarian in that hospital. He told us that it’s difficult to diagnose IBD by pathological examination which is not only expensive but also time-consuming. In fact, the real morbidity of IBD is higher than the data. Besides, Dr. Gao also recommended some books about animal physiology to us, and we had some brief talks with some dog owners. They told us the information of the expenses of pet health examination and probiotics some of them had provided support for our SWOT Analysis Report.
Figure 4. iGEMer in pet hospital.
Figure 5. iGEMer with veterinarian.
3.Company
We know that there is a long way to go form laboratory to factory, for us, one of the effective way is to communicate with product manufacturers directly. So we managed to an online conversation with Zhishan Li who is the chairman of Besler company (Figure 6). At first, he introduced some probiotic products and related policy to us. Then he suggested that in the future we should make an effort to retrofit commonly used probiotic bacteria strains like Bifidobacterium. At last he showed great confidence for our project because of it’s novelty.
Figure 6.The commany logo.
4.Professors
4.1 Donghai Zhou (Vice President of Animal Hospital of HZAU-China)
As a specialist in the animal clinical area, professor Zhou's opinions are very important for the application of our project. He told us that the clinical symptoms of IBD in humans and dogs have many similarities, so our ideas can be adjusted to apply in humans and other mammals with more special attention on the ethical issues. Besides, we also talked with him about our idea——designing experiments to explore how dogs would react when smell geosmin. He suggested that it’s necessary for us to learn about ethics and safety principle before taking actions. However, because of the impact of COVID-19, this idea has not been put into practice.
Figure 7. iGEMer communicate with professor.
4.2 Ding Yi (DVM, Ph.D)
To observe the feasibility and potential improvement of our idea, we had an interview with Professor Yi Ding, Doctor of Veterinary Medicine. We described the project and our question on whether geosmin would cause any abnormality on dogs’ ethology. “There are multiple ways dogs use to socialize, not only excreta,” He told us, “which means off-odor in feces is unlikely to have serious impact on them.” He also suggested us to design an odor-visualization module in our hardware so that people could recognize the produce of geosmin accurately.
Figure 8. iGEMers with YiDing.
WITH REVERSE TALENTS
"How does the world affect us, and how do we affect the world?" We are always thinking and practicing this question. In March 2021, we went to Wuhan 14th Middle School(Figure 9). Most of them will attend the college entrance exam and then decide what to major in college after one year. So apart from sharing our project design, we also gave them a brief introduction on synthetic biology and discussed with them about the margins and the future of biology from our perspective. It was surprised that most of them showed great enthusiasm about iGEM. Some of them even write letters to talk with us about our subject design and how to be an iGEMer.
Figure 9.iGEMer gived class for high school.
EXCHANGE WITH OTHER TEAMS
Communicating with other iGEM teams in meetup is an efficient way for us to solve the problems we faced. In the different stages of our project, we had meetups with different teams. (Figure 10)It sparked a lot of passion and confidence.
Figure 10. The online and offline meetups we had participated in.
THE FUTURE OF P.E.T
We know it’s necessary for us to do some efforts in business fields. We found that SWOT Analysis is a simple tool which can help us to analyze what we should do right now and how to devise a successful strategy for the future. SWOT stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats, which is a technique for assessing systematically from four aspects of our projects. So it’s a good way for us to hold an integrative thinking about the future of P.E.T. It’s a special experience for HZAU-iGEMers to think in business perspective.https://static.igem.org/mediawiki/2021/d/d7/T--HZAU-China--jhs.pdf
BUCT
In the initial stage of the project design, we had many discussions with BUCT. In a discussion, we learned that BUCT wants to design a suicide system to ensure the safety of engineered bacteria. We suggested that they can use MazF as a toxin for the suicide of engineered bacteria. Meanwhile, we thought that the oxygen-sensitive promoter as a switch is a very delicate design.