1. Interview with the Selenium supplementary products’ customers & The general public about Synthetic Biology
Since our engineered bacteria ECN-PSB1A3 is about selenium supplement in human body through changing intestinal flora not only in human but also in possibly livestock, it is essential to find our potential customers. To do so, we designed an online questionnaire through wenjuan.com filling in anonymously and voluntary way to know the selenium supplement ideas from Chinese population in general and hear their opinions towards our project.
We have got 266 responses on our survey, from people from many different backgrounds, ages, and schooling, as shown below. Since we are high school students, some of the answers were from students, which we have felt like could bias our results, hence why we have decided to present the survey results in separate careers to promote cross-understanding in a socially general point of view.
For our survey, we asked some questions, including their opinions towards selenium supplement such as “10. Have you ever known about the benefits of selenium?”, their knowledge about selenium supplement such as “8. What is the daily nutrient requirement for selenium?”, their dietary habits, and their ideas towards our project such as “16. Do you think synthetic biological methods can solve selenium deficiency?”.
As a result, we could notice that people who are well educated( such as teachers, doctors or entrepreneurs) is more likely to know more about selenium, though there is only 24.44% of the whole people know the benefits of selenium according to Figure 1.3, which also reveals a problem that selenium supplement is not paid attention from the public. In Figure 1.1, the number for choosing Yes in educated groups is larger in comparison with others. In Figure 1.2, the number for educated people to choose the correct answer is larger.(50-200 is the correct answer.)
Figure 2
(Q:Have you ever known about the benefits of selenium?)
When doing the cross analysis of age and people’s understandings of selenium, the elderly are more inclined to learn about selenium supplement.It make sense sinceold people usually pay more attention on health. Therefore, our potential customers should be people who appreciate healthier body, especially old people in China.
Furthermore, we can also have cooperation with companies in livestock raising or processing industry who would like to increase the selenium content in their products and in the future.
Figure 3.1
Figure 3.1 (Q:Have you ever known about the benefits of selenium?)
Figure 3.2
Figure 3.3
We also found out the possibility of which people who prefer eating vegetables try to know and eat more selenium in comparison with people who usually have meat diet or prefer sea food. Sea food and meat contain more selenium than vegetables in most cases. In Figure 3.1, 30.4%vegetarians know the benefits of selenium but only 21.8%people who prefer meat and seafood know about selenium. In Figure 3.2, 56.5% vegetarians(34.8% for having Se-enriched yeast and 21.7% for having Selenium oral solution) use medicine to enhance their selenium supplement. However, for people who prefer meat and seafood, only 25.5% of them(9.1% for having Se-enriched yeast and 16.4% for having Selenium oral solution) need medicine for their selenium supplement.
Moreover, according to Figure 3.3, most vegetarian are women, which means perhaps women are more likely to have selenium deficiency.
Most importantly, we found that according to the dietary behavior of the general public, the most popular food types are fruit and meats, which indicated that these two types can be the further target food resource to implement our engineered strain to promote the efficacy in an optimum approach.
Lastly, through the survey, most people(73.68%) have confidence in solving selenium deficiency with synthetic biology, which is what we are trying to achieve. Overall, the public attitude towards the ability of synthetic biology to solve problems is positive. We check this general attitude in more cohorts at school, in elderly neighborhoods, in hospitals and on street-surveys.
2. Market Survey of Selenium-related products
In this part, our human practice is mainly divided into two parts:
1) the investigation of existing Se-relevant products cost and market price;
2) the investigation of the cost and feasibility of strain production in big
quantity.
First, to develop a better understanding of the market situation, our HP group visit 5 most promising and popular supermarkets in three different economical levels of cities in China: Shenzhen, Beijing, Yantai and Lanzhou. Moreover, we use the highly-developed e-commerce platform to collect the feedback from customers and more product information from the merchants. We collected the statistics of different types of Se-related products, which are Selenium health-care products, Se-rich rice, Se-rich eggs, fruits and meats. All in all, we analyze the cost performance and efficacy of the various types.
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According to the statistics from the investigation, we found that the Se-supplement hiealth care products have the highest average cost performance of Selenium content, which is 56.3mcg/CNY, but the average price of these products are about 150+ CNY per bottle, which is a relative high cost of general public. According to statistics, more than 0.1 billion of people in China is in lack of Selenium(Wang Jing’s team, Distribution and translocation of selenium from soil to highland barley in the Tibetan Plateau Kashin-Beck disease area [J]. Environmental Geochemistry and Health, 2017, 39(1): 221-229), but only about 1 million people have bought Se health-care products, which strongly indicates that this approach is not common enough to be further implemented to more populaces.
Hence, we focus our sight to a more common approach of Se supplement-the meat. According to statistics, the content of Selenium in domestic livestock’s organs can be up to about 50-70 mcg/kg, which is the highest content besides seafood, and meats are the highly common daily food of people that can be publicized easily.
Therefore, we came up with the idea to develop a approach to enhance the content ratio in meats.
3. Investigation with the probiotic and strain producers
In this part, we hold several meetings with professional producers for two purposes:
1) Learn about the fundamental knowledge of the Probiotic Industry;
2) Learn about the market environment and have a cost understanding for
further production.
4. Meeting with Mr.Shufeng Si
Mr.Shufeng Si is the principal of the Ecological Research Institute, Shandong Zhongke Jiayi Biological Engineering Corporation. He is an expert in the engineering, production and safety ensuring of probiotic strains. In this meeting, he provided specific knowledge of the intestinal probiotic types, requirements and challenges of production, such as selection, dose, frequency, and dosage form. Moreover, we learned the basic technological process of microbial fermentation and storage, which is essential to put forward our project process. Additionally, we discussed on the price and cost of production.
Through this meeting, we develop a clear budget of the investment of engineered strain(1.6CNY/Billion) and put forward further market research to estimate the total cost of our novel approach of Se supplement.
In this part, we meet a gastroenterologist and a nutritionist to learn about the potential safety problems about intestinal strain colonization and the nutrition requirement about reared brolier to evaluate our product’s qualification.
Meeting with nutritionist Ms.Chen at Shenzhen NO.2 people’s hospital
In this offline meeting, Dr.Chen provided an official guide of the appropriate daily content of human and some relevant species in our study.
She also provided us some specific ways to determine the physiological stage of an organism, such as the Coomassie blue assay for detecting the total protein Takara in the liver supernatant. determining the physiological indicators of GSH-px, Trx R, CAT and T-SOD and injury indicators such as AST/ALT and MDA in liver tissues and serum. These methods are useful for our expectation’s practical implementation, that can be applied in a comprehensive detection system.
Meeting with gastroenterologist Ms.Guo at Beijing Tongren hospital
In this meeting, we fully discuss our project with Ms.Guo. She provided us some suggestions and support.Suggestions: 1. Provide other bacteria with similar functions and analyze their defects 2. Determine the audience. At present, it is considered that this selenium supplement method is more suitable for people with selenium absorption disorder. 3.Consider whether to introduce immunofluorescence in our expected in-vivo colonization. This is vital for the consideration of further expanding and upgrading our project in post-iGEM period.
She mentioned that this selenium supplement method is theoretically more cost-effective and simple than the current mainstream of traditional selenium supplement method and encouraged us to compare the cost and effect specifically with chemically synthesized selenium supplements to make the description of our project more promising.
CCiC
The Conference of China iGEMer Community, CCiC, is the biggest academic meetings for iGEMers all around China. This year, we attended the 8th CCiC conference held by Fudan University and many brilliant syn-bio corporate. We present our project through slides and posters. The judges and other teams approved our project, provided suggestions and exchanged constructive ideas.
The Integration of our project and Chinese Culture
Fan is a kind of necessity in the cohort of the elders in China, especially in eastern high-poplated communities, where Selenium content in soil is not enough but economic power is strong. We show Chinese culture by inventing Chinese fans with Se-supplement poem that we wrote by ourselves to Raise the awareness of intake of Se. Moreover, we publicize this product in a voluntary way in neighborhoods and communities to raise the elder’s awareness and inform our new approach of Se intake with less harm.
