Team:NUS Singapore/Human Practices

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Human Practices

Introducing our Human-Centric Approach

Singapore's Food Issue and the Rise of Urban Farms

In 2019, the Singaporean government announced the “30 by 30” goal - to meet 30% of our nutritional needs locally and sustainably by 2030. To do so, Singapore had to find ways to overcome its land and resource limitations. And so, we turned to technology.

The onset of urban farms in Singapore has been rapid and continues to expand every day. Aquaponics, aeroponics, and hydroponics are amongst the new techniques utilised at urban farms in Singapore. Most of these farms are multi-storied and indoors to overcome the hurdles in finding arable agricultural land on the island.

The tightly packed, damp, low-lit conditions in urban farms make them the perfect nesting site for several pests. Most of these indoor farms abide by organic farming practices to meet their consumers' needs. Thus, they avoid the usage of commercial chemical pesticides. However, without commercial pesticides, they are left with few solutions to tackle their pests with - this is where PRYSM comes in.

Helping the Urban Farms

Formulating our solution: The Human Centric Approach

The NUS iGEM team believes that every good scientific project needs to be well-informed and shaped by its users. Over the last year, our Human Practices (HP) team has worked to talk to every possible stakeholder associated with this problem. This pest problem, although seemingly small, has a much larger impact on each of us, and we wanted to illustrate that. So, we aimed to design a solution that answered the needs of every stakeholder involved in the agricultural process - from farmers and R&D scientists to the regulatory authorities and consumers. Every conversation we have had has impacted the solution we now present to you. As you explore our HP page, you will see how the takeaways from every conversation ultimately shaped our final solution.

At the end of the day, we wanted to make sure that PRYSM was not just a theoretical, scientific solution. PRYSM answers the needs of our fellow Singaporeans, aiding in taking a step forward into a self-reliant food future.

Explore our Integrated Human Practices

Navigate through our Integrated Human Practices using the tab bar below!

1. Understand the Local Pest Problem 2. Define a Good Solution 3. Ideate our Solution 4. Implementation and Evaluation

UNDERSTAND THE LOCAL PEST PROBLEM

1. Local Context: The Unique Challenges faced by Singapore's Urban Farms

Since the onset of the “30 by 30” goals, urban farms have been sprawling across the island - from carpark rooftops and unused outdoor spaces to abandoned schoolhouses. Every farm is working towards the goal of meeting our unsated nutritional needs. These farms use a variety of technologies and pest control solutions, but to the most extent, they are all ‘organic’ by definition.

The term “organic” is usually used to refer to farming practices that abstain from using synthetic fertilisers, pesticides and insecticides. To maintain sustainable farming practices and meet the needs of the consumers, most urban farms in Singapore conform to this standard of farming, using only natural pesticides like herbal oils (neem, chilli), if using any at all. And, this is what we wanted to explore as we set out to talk to farms across the island. By using less effectual, but greener pesticides, we wanted to see if they were able to keep pests at bay. If not, are there alternatives that they would be open to?

2. Identifying the Problem: A Field Investigation in a Local Urban Farm

To contextualise the problems in urban farms and to understand the gap in the local food supply chain we contacted Singrow - a local vertical strawberry farm. Singrow is located in what was once the Henderson Secondary School, a mere 20 minutes away from our busy central business district. The farm started as a means to grow seasonal produce with no environmental constraints, all-year-around. Walking into the farm, we were faced with rows and rows of strawberry shrubs, with tiny little ruby bulbs proliferating under the blue glow of the grow lights in the indoor farm.

Singrow

Their Signature "Ruby Strawberries"

The NUS iGEM team had the opportunity to speak to one of the farm technicians about the farm and their issues. He was working his way through trimming some leaves off the shrubs, 3 meters off the ground. We realised that he was trimming very specific leaves - those with a white substance spreading on them. It was powdery mildew, he explained, a fungus that spreads quickly under the conditions in an indoor farm and can have detrimental impacts on the harvests.

Powdery mildew affects a wide range of plants, not just strawberries. It thrives in highly humid, moderate temperature environments, like those of indoor farms. At Singrow, the rampant spread of powdery mildew has detrimental impacts on the farm harvests, accounting for nearly 30-40% loss in revenue annually.

Powdery Mildew as seen at Singrow

Singrow does not use any commercial synthetic pesticide to combat this issue. The lab manager informed us that as an organic farm, Singrow's pest-control options were limited. The have tried to use organic pesticides like neem oil, employed preventive measures like using diatomaceous earth, but all to no avail. The efficiency of these cleaner alternatives is low, and powdery mildew continues to spread in the farm. They have resorted to manually picking out infected leaves, making it a painstaking, laborious process. The alternative to this is employing a fully developed controlled environment agriculture (CEA) system, but the start-up and maintenance costs are far too high for these systems and would appropriately drive the price of their produce up - something that Singrow wants to avoid.

“We need a pest solution that is low-cost, effective and in line with organic farming practices” , stressed the farm technicians as we further investigated the issue. And, it is this statement that formed the premise for our iGEM project this year.

3. Verifying the Need: Interviewing Various Types of Local Urban Farms

To validate the need for a powdery mildew solution in Singapore’s farms, we interviewed our primary stakeholders - farmers. We sought experts from both large- and small-scale local farms, and those practicing different farming techniques, including indoor hydroponics farms, indoor soil-based farms, rooftop hydroponic farms, and outdoor soil-based farms. Adapting the interview framework from the NUS team back in 2019, we approached these farms to learn the answers to three main questions:

1. What are their major pest problems?
2. What is their current pest control solution?
3. What do they seek in an ideal pest control solution?

Click on each of the bubbles below to find out more about what we learnt from each farm!

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Dickson Ng, Archisen

Indoor Hydroponics Organic Farm

Archisen’s farms produce some of the highest yields amongst the indoor farms in Singapore. They sell their produce to leading retailers across the island. They are an AgriTech company that utilises a farm management system called Controlled-Environment Agriculture (CEA). This system essentially controls all climatic variables, including, temperature, humidity, light intensity, and air composition. CEA is a component of their Integrated Pest Management (IPM) system at Archisen that ensures their produce is fresh and safe for consumption. Archisen also strictly follows the guidelines of Singapore Food Agency and avoids the usage of any conventional pesticides in their farming practices.

In our talks with Dickson Ng, a farm technologist at Archisen, we learnt that powdery mildew can be a source of concern for CEA farms. To address these fungal infections, preventive countermeasures are often much preferred to corrective ones.

Their ideal pest control solution:

1. Approved by the Singapore Food Agency with an excellent safety profile
2. One that can be complementary with their CEA as part of their IPM
3. One that can be regularly applied as a preventive measure, which requires it to be human safe and preferably low-cost

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Sophie Zhang, Sustenir

Indoor Hydroponics Organic Farm

Sustenir is an indoor urban farming company that uses controlled environment agriculture (CEA) to grow non-native plants in Singapore. Sophie Zhang, the R&D manager, talked to us about the pros and cons of CEA in small farms in Singapore. She said, although they are effective, CEA is expensive. Sustenir has looked at using the biopesticides approved in Singapore as an alternative. However, the current biopesticides in market are not effective against the occasional pest infections in their farm. For safety reasons, Sustenir prefers treatment to the seeds or the hydroponic growing medium instead of to the plants themselves. She further testifies that the demand for a safe alternative biopesticide is high amongst farms in Singapore.

Their ideal pest control solution:

1. Approved by the Singapore Food Agency and preferably WHO
2. Have an excellent safety profile
3. One that is effective as a treatment to seeds or that can be added to the growth medium

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Darren Tan, ComCrop

Rooftop Hydroponics Organic Farm

ComCrop is Singapore’s first and only commercial rooftop farm. They repurpose marginalised rooftop spaces to produce crops with natural sunlight and sustainable farming techniques, to keep their costs low and still provide people with fresh, home-grown greens. The crops are grown in a greenhouse to minimise pest interactions, but they do not use artificial air conditioning to maintain optimal air conditions as part of the CEA, in line with producing affordable greens. Darren Tan, the head of education and community outreach, talked to us about ComCrop’s farm philosophies and their issues with pests. The rooftop farm does encounter challenges while trying to keep pests, both insects and fungi, at bay. Currently, they do not use any strict measures to tackle their problems - the crops are rotated, fly traps are used and infected greens are weeded out. Since ComCrop cares deeply about being a pesticide-free and non-GMO farm to cater to its consumers, they do not utilize any pesticide, not even natural or biological solutions.

Their ideal pest control solution:

1. A contactless pesticide - one that won't 'touch' their plants directly, to keep in line with their pesticide-free greens philosophy
2. One that uses no GMOs
3. One that will be accepted by consumers

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Jolene Lum, Urban Tiller

Local Produce Retailer

Urban Tiller retails farm-to-table green produce by bridging farmers and consumers directly. Urban Tiller only sells fresh fruits and vegetables produced by local farms. Thus, Urban Tiller is deeply connected with local farms and understands their situations and needs. The CEO, Jolene Lum, has observed that many local farms avoid using any pesticide due to pre-observed consumer aversion. However, not using pesticides has resulted in heavy loss of revenues when a pest outbreak strikes the farm, leaving farmers out of job for months. Jolene urged us to develop a pesticide which consumers would be more open to.

Their ideal pest control solution:

1. One that will be accepted by consumers
2. Based on natural ingredients
3. A human-safe, environmentally friendly pesticide

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Fireflies Farm

Outdoor Soil-based Organic Farm

Fireflies farm is an outdoor organic farm that grows commonly consumed vegetables and fruits. Their major pest problems include fungi, aphids, and beetles. The owner mentioned having previously tested a microbial pesticide against aphids, however, he no longer uses it because of a reduced impact on this type of pests.

Their ideal pest control solution:

1. Effective and cheap
2. One that can target several pests, not just one, which concurrently combats pest resistance

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Tan Koon Hua, Farm 85

Outdoor Soil-based Conventional Farm

Farm 85 is a traditional, outdoor soil-based farm. They grow vegetables for commercial purposes, and thus, their farm has a high turnover rate. They are, however, troubled by several common pests like fungi and insects, and they utilize a combination of chemical and biological pesticides to keep them at bay and prevent resistance development.

Their ideal pest control solution:

1. Effective and cheap
2. A safe pesticide with low residual level in plants
3. One that is approved by SFA and passes food safety tests
4. One that can be used in conjunction with other methods to combat pest resistance

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Evelyn Eng-Lim, Green Circle

Outdoor Soil-based Organic Farm

Green Circle is an outdoor “forest-like” organic farm with a specific focus on environmental conservation and sustainable agriculture. They focus on the cultivation of local crops, those that require minimal human intervention to grow in our local climate.

This farm, run by and supporting the owner family, believes strongly in not using synthetic fertilizers or pesticides. In fact, they use tree leaves and rejected mung beans from bean sprout factories to make fertilizers to feed their plants. Because of the natural cultivation philosophy and the lack of pesticide usage, the farm does ocasionally suffer from massive pest outbreaks. However, the owner informed us they would not accept any pesticides. Instead, they prefer to stick to natural agricultural techniques, relying on the crop’s immune system to fend off pests.

Their ideal pest control solution:

1. One that is purely natural, and does not have any impact on the crops whatsoever

What we learned: There is a need for a biological solution on all farms, especially organic ones, to control the spread of fungal pathogens like powdery mildew. Not only does it have to be efficacious, but it also needs to address concerns regarding its safety, cost and sustainability. In the next section, we define the requirements for a good solution as per our users’ needs to appropriately target the problem.

Another noteworthy point that arose in the conversations was that some farms avoided biopesticides, despite a verified need, due to consumers’ aversion towards them. This necessitated further investigations into consumer attitudes towards biopesticides, which we address in the Implementation and Evaluation section.

DEFINE A GOOD SOLUTION

1. Prioritize the Farmers’ needs

From our interviews with the farms, we returned with many needs to consider. However, given the limited resources available and time, we could only prioritize those required by most of the local farms.

The biopesticide needs of the farms can be summarised into 8 key stakeholder inputs:

1. Effective against various microbial pathogens
2. Safe to be approved by the Singapore Food Agency (SFA)
3. A biological product so that it can be applied in organic farms
4. Devoid of foreign genetic material
5. Inexpensive to produce
6. Cost-efficient purification
7. System should be able to produce pesticide as per the pest type present in the farm
8. Easy to operate

2. Build on available solution

We then asked – can these needs be met by the available pest solutions in Singapore markets? What are the market gaps that our product would need to fill-in? The Singapore Food Agency (SFA) regulates and registers agricultural pesticides used in the cultivation of crops intended for consumption in Singapore. A quick search on their website displays the list of approved agricultural pesticides in Singapore - apart from all the synthetic pesticides, there are only two kinds of biopesticides, namely, neem oil and Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) that have been approved.

Neem oil is a natural substance extracted from neem trees. It can repel a variety of insects and is generally listed in under the reduced risk biopesticides list. However, it is often not effective in practice, as seen at Singrow. Bacillus thuringiensis is a bacterium that contains an insecticidal toxin Cry. However, due to its wide use over the years, insects have developed resistance to it globally. Most importantly, neither are effective against fungi, such as powdery mildew, the most common pest in urban farms and our primary concern. The available biological pesticides in the market spurred us to find naturally-occurring, effective, broad-spectrum antifungal molecules that do not require GMO application to plants. To develop an even safer biopesticide, we searched for antimicrobial proteins that naturally exist inside the human body or those that are safe for consumption. The cost of producing such human proteins tends to be high and to lower this cost, we hope to produce them by leveraging synthetic biology tools.

3. Comply with Regulatory Frameworks

Singapore Food Agency is the regulatory body in charge of the registration and use of pesticides. Since SFA has not approved any naturally-occurring proteins produced via biomanufacturing, and the farmers stressed that it was essential for SFA to approve the pesticide before they used it on their farms. So, we approached SFA for their safety requirements for such products.

For biopesticide registration, the SFA evaluation committee requires data on purity, human safety and environmental safety. The SFA secretariat specifically pointed out that the nature of indoor farms - closed, compact spaces close to residential areas - pose greater challenges with regards to the safety of pesticides. Despite the fact that biopestcides are non-consumables, the SFA still requires a level of purity to ensure safety for food consumption and release into the environment. Particularly for bioproduction, the members suggested that we thoroughly purify our product to remove any GMOs and apply biosafety measures. For research and release of GMO, the SFA directed us to the Genetic Modification Advisory Committee (GMAC) for further regulatory information.

The GMAC evaluates the risks in research and release of GMO into the environment, as well as the integration of the modified gene into other species. The secretariats of GMAC, Ms Kang Li Xin and Ms Mazlina Banu Jaikubali, suggested minimizing the risks of any release of genetically engineered cells, as it poses threats to the environment with the possibility to affect other species, especially mammals. For research in bioproduction, they stressed the importance of the bioreactor design to ensure biosafety.

The Singapore Food Agency

Genetic Modification Advisory Committee Secreteriats

According to the SFA represenatives, our product would need to meet certain standards with regards to:

1. Human safety and Ecological Safety
2. Purity

According to the GMAC secreteriat committee, our product would need to meet certain standards with regards to:

1. Human safety and Ecological Safety
2. Biosafety

IDEATE OUR SOLUTION

Guided by the farmers’ needs, the available solutions, and the regulations, we came up with a preliminary design to biologically produce an antimicrobial, human-safe, and purified protein to can be used as a biopesticide.

With this preliminary design guideline derived from our stakeholders’ input, we consulted experts in the fields of genetic engineering and hardware design and improved our design iteratively with their feedback.

1. Genetic Engineering Feedback and Improvement

Click on each of the bubbles below to find out more about what we learnt from each expert!

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Jonathan Bester, Vaciome

Vaciome is a synbio startup that develops recombinant livestock feed additives. According to Dr. Jonathan Bester, the co-founder of Vaciome, the cost of purification is one of the core challenges of biomanufacturing low-cost peptides. With our initial idea to utilise lactoferrin as a biopesticide, we faced several challenges. Mr Bester then advised us to switch to producing smaller antimicrobial peptides instead and graciously provided us with a Human Beta Defensin construct for P. pastoris in order to aid us in porting the fragment into an S. cerevisiae circuit.

Improving our solution: Human beta-defensins are human-safe proteins predominantly secreted from leukocytes and epithelial tissues. They function as an antimicrobial defence system, penetrating a microbe's cell membrane and causing microbial death in a manner similar to that of antibiotics. Thus, they have the potential to be used as biological pesticides in agriculture. Inspired by flocculating yeasts in wine fermentation, we thought of making use of the yeast’s ability to flocculate, to separate them from our product, assisting in purification. This would allow us to lower the cost of producing low-value proteins such as human beta-defensins, and utilize yeasts for their ability to secrete the protein and flocculate, cutting down a majority costs of the otherwise expensive purification processes.

Solution after the first iteration: to produce human beta-defensins in S. Cerevisiae with chemical induction and flocculation as the only purification procedure.

Design principles achieved through the first iteration:

1. Effective
2. Human safe
3. Environmentally friendly
4. Low cost

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Dr Adison Wong, Singapore Institute of Technology

Dr Adison Wong is a leading expert in bioproduction in Singapore. Dr Wong reminded us of the purity standard in the industry, indicating that flocculation alone may not be able to purify all GM yeasts in the product solution. Thus, we decided to implement an additional kill switch to prevent the genetically engineered yeast from persisting in our product.

Improving our solution: While flocculation can largely separate the yeast from the product, a kill switch further prevents the leakage of genetically engineered yeasts into our final biopesticide, the environment and other species.

Solution after the second iteration: to produce human beta-defensins in S. Cerevisiae with chemical induction, flocculation and a kill switch.

Design principles achieved through the second iteration:

1. Human safe
2. Environmentally friendly
3. Biosafety

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Reiss Jones, Synthesea

We further refined our bioproduction system for a low-value protein to be more cost-efficient by integrating more experts’ advice. Synthesea is a synbio startup producing alternative fish oil. Reiss Jones, the co-founder of Synthesea, informed us that conventional bioreactors are not economically scalable because of issues with chemical inducers and purification methods. Following this, instead of using chemical inducers, we decided to develop a bioreactor that optogenetics as an induction system. He also mentioned that any form of foreign DNA that persists in the final product will run into issues with regulations, which was line with our insights from the conversation with Dr Adison Wong.

Improving our solution: Compared to conventional chemical induction, using optogenetics enables us to furtherlower costs, especially in large-scale production systems. It would also allow for automated bioproduction on-site, at the farms without requiring any manual addition of chemicals. We were further inspired to ultilise, two light systems, to give us a larger variety of logic gates to induce the growth phase, production phase and the kill switch.

Solution after the third iteration: to produce human beta-defensins in S. Cerevisiae with optogenetics induction, flocculation and nuclease as kill switch.

Design principles achieved through the third iteration:

1. Low cost
2. Yield

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Professor Harrison Steel, University of Oxford, Chi.Bio

Chi.Bio develops open-source automated bioreactors with modalities including optogenetics. Prof. Harrison Steel from the University of Oxyford, founder of Chi.Bio, pointed out the challenges in scaling up bioreactors, especially with regards to optogenetics induction systems. In a large, cylindrical bioreactor, the light penetrability is low. Thus, he suggested testing our system as a small bioreactor first as a proof of concept, and then move to thinking about light penetrability in the future for scaling up.

Improving our solution: To address the issue of low light penetrability especially in a large bioreactor, a feed-forward optogenetics circuit to produce more EL222 under blue light was employed toincrease the sensitivity of our system to light and thus the improve the yield.

Solution after the fourth iteration: to produce human beta-defensins in S. Cerevisiae with a feed-forward optogenetics induction system, flocculation and nuclease as kill switch.

Design principles achieved through the fourth iteration:

1. Yield
2. Scalability

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Dr Tan Siang Hee, CropLife Asia

CropLife Asia is a trade association of agrochemical companies that promote agriculture technologies. When we presented our optogenetic circuit to Dr Tan, the director of CropLife Asia, he recognized its novelty and said that it matched industrial attempts to lower the cost of mass bioproduction. To further help us improve our design, he suggested proving the effectiveness of the light induction design in a small-scale bioreactor, as also suggested by Prof Harrison Steel from Chi.Bio.

Improving our solution: Due to the issue of economical scalability of bioreactors in the industry, we decided to lower the cost by targeting small-scale bioreactors that can produce bio-pesticides at the farms. For this decentralized bioproduction model, the potential risks we identified were operational errors by non-professionals and the leakage of genetically engineered materials into the environment. Keeping this in mind, we designed our automated light-controlled design to induce changes in the production phase, flocculation and kill switch, allowing farmers to walk away after adding the feedstock and come back when the product is ready. The automated bioreactors are not only user-friendly, but also improve biosafety as they can reduce human operational errors.

Solution after the fifth iteration: to produce human beta-defensin in S. Cerevisiae with a feed-forward optogenetics induction system, flocculation, and nuclease as a kill switch on-site at the farms with asmall-scale, decentralized, automatic bioreactors

Design principles achieved through the fifth iteration:

1. Human safe
2. Environmentally friendly
3. Biosafety
4. Automative and user-friendly operation

As evident from our conversations with these experts, each conversation helped us improve our design further and hit the different design principles we aimed to achieve with our final solution. The improvements in our wet-lab systems and hardware design also allowed us to develop models that were important and useful for our design.

2. Hardware Design Feedback and Improvements

Dr. Bao Shengjie from Singrow listed 3 requirements for our bioreactor design. First, due to the limited space within the indoor farm, we had to consider the size and shape of the reactor itself. Most reactors on the market are too large and cumbersome to fit on the farm floor. The second aspect to consider was user functionality, as the operators of our proof-of-concept (POC) device would be farmhands with no prior training in operating commercial bioreactors. Lastly, the cost of the overall reactor infrastructure itself. Most farms do not have the capital to purchase an expensive industrial reactor. Therefore, we had to factor in the overall cost of hardware.

Taking these considerations into account, we decided to scale down the POC device to a benchtop scale with a total operating volume of 100 mL as a starting point. This allowed us to reduce the overall footprint of the reactor. Our reactor electronics were also built using cheap, off-the-shelf components to ensure that the cost was low and the accessibility to replacement parts was high. Lastly, most structural parts were 3D printed in PLA to reduce the overall manufacturing cost. Our CAD/STL files, Bill-of-materials (BOM) and operating code have also been made publicly available for download to promote the open-source accessibility of the hardware. View our open-source material here.

Dr Steel from Chi.Bio further advised us that an effective bioreactor would require the temperature of the culture media to be kept within a 0.5°C of the target temperature set-point . This was taken into account in our bioreactor - our bioreactor design aims to keep the temperature of the media regulated at 0.5°C from our set point of 30°C for the S. cerevisiae culture. In order to achieve this measurement, we opted to use a contactless temperature measurement modality using an IR Temperature sensor for accurate temperature detection.

Dr Steel also advised that the use of a red-light laser system or IR light diode are both fairly efficacious, and thus we opted to continue using an IR diode and detector system for OD measurement as a red-light laser system may interfere with our optogenetics regulation cell machinery, as well as increase costs. In addition to that point, he also wanted to ensure the stability of the light source over temperature fluctuations, which we addressed by keeping the IR LED separate from the main culture vessel and temperature regulation circuitry, removing the LED from the largest potential source of temperature fluctuations.

Dr Addison Wong, informed us that from a pharmaceutical manufacturing standpoint- purification would be the most costly step of the production process. To address this issue, our bioreactor took on a shaking aeration modality (in contrast to stirring) to allow for our yeast strain to effectively flocculate; stirring would prematurely disrupt the process of flocculation by impacting cell sedimentation. Through the process of clumping and sedimentation, flocculation allows the modified yeast to sink to the bottom of the flask, leaving the supernatant virtually free of cells, reducing the amount of expensive purification that would be otherwise required. These insights informed our decision-making process throughout the project, allowing us to settle on a solution that meets the key stakeholder inputs and the operational parameters of our bioreactor. Click here to find out more about our hardware

IMPLEMENTATION AND EVALUATION

1. How our Stakeholder Inputs Defined our Design Choices

2. Consumer Awareness Survey and Education

To understand the possible consumer aversion to pesticide usage, as brought up by Jolene from Urban Tiller, we designed a consumer attitudes survey to be deployed in the local community in Singapore. We surveyed 132 Singaporeans from different demographic groups to understand their openness to and perceptions of biopesticides as compared to commercial pesticides. Over half of the respondents indicated concerns with the usage of conventional pesticides in crops , however, 80% were open to the usage of biopesticides! This indicates that consumers do understand the difference between conventional pesticides and biopesticides to a certain extent. Additionally, while 70.3% believe that biopesticides are environmentally friendly, 65.9% believe that they are natural, 52.7% think that they are safe for consumption, but only 36.3% think it’s organic. These results indicate that biopesticides, while they are getting increasingly familiar, there are still consumers with a lot of concerns, emphasizing the need for an appropriate public education campaign.

View our Survey View our Survey Results

One of the biggest gaps that was observed through our surveys and conversations with SFA and GMAC was the lack of consumer awareness towards biopesticides, hindering their entry into the market. We believe that if consumers are able to make the informed decision to accept the usage of biopesticides on farms, the farmer adoption and market expansion for biopesticides will exponentially rise. In order to target the misconceptions consumers may have about biopesticides, we decided to create a short, consumer education video entailing what exactly a biopesticide is and how it is safe, efficacious and can help revolutionize the future of agriculture in Singapore.

View our consumer education video below:

3. Closing the loop: Farmers and Regulatory Authority

1. Regulatory authority: We reapproached SFA and GMAC for their feedback on our biopesticide and bioreactor. SFA evaluated the human beta-defensin. Being a natural small protein in the human body, it is likely to be human safe and leaves little or no residues in the environment. Thus, it has potential to function in even indoor organic farms as a preventive-corrective pest control solution. For its future application in farms, SFA recommended using our HDB2 as a part of the Integrated Pest Management for higher efficacy and less pest resistance. The GMAC secretariats assessed that our human beta-defensin is likely to be approved for release by GMAC as it is a purified protein from the GM yeasts. They also added that our modification, being in yeasts, would not pose an ethical risk, although further consideration and approval would be required for the safety of our engineered organisms.

   We also consulted them to gain feedback on our human safety and biosafety designs - protein purification, kill switch, and automation of the decentralized bioreactors. SFA commented that while the flocculation and kill switch effectively remove yeast, we can still explore secondary purification steps for higher purity and safety standards. GMAC pointed out that the decentralized bioreactors at farms would need both, careful hardware design and education to ensure biosafety. While confirming that an automatic bioreactor design helps to reduce human errors, they further suggested educating the farmers, requiring PPE and monitoring the decentralized bioreactors.

2. Farmers: Throughout the bioreactor design process, we ensured that our system was aligned with the needs of the local farms. We spoke to Singrow, our primary stakeholder, to close the loop with our primary stakeholder. We took the bioreactor prototype back to Singrow on 20th October 2021 to learn how they felt about our overall design and how we could further improve our design in future iterations. We showed them how the hardware works (as seen in the clip below) and how it is automated, requiring minimal user input. The manager at Singrow was impressed with our compact, decentralized design. The human beta-defensin-2 production yeast chassis could not be brought to the farm due to biosafety issues. However, they were interested in potentially using human beta defensin-2 as a biopesticide in the future, based on the promising MIC results obtained in the wet lab. There is most definitely scope for improvement in terms of packaging the bioreactor in a further simplified system, however, overall the positive responses from them was promising for the future of PRYSM.