Team:QHFZ/Human Practices
Integrated Human Practices
Content
How ordinary people think about our project?
Whether our project is feasible in the industrial world?
Is there anything we can improve for our project?
Overview
In this section we intend to link our academic achievement to the community, the industry, and ultimately to the world. Our project is to design a biological approach to produce a kind of dye called Tyrian purple. During this process we interviewed professionals, visited factories and designed a questionnaire to make sure the feasibility of our project and improving it from time to time. We hope to collect information about our project from different aspects. We ask ourselves three question, and we have a series of human practice events and try to find the answers.
Part 1: Problem Investigation
Interview with expert on chemistry synthesis
Form: Online
Interviewee: Professor Yunhe Jin from Dalian University of Technology
Key Points:
(1) Prof. Jin explained to us the disadvantages of chemistry synthesis.
(2) We learnt about how to identify Tyrian purple once we successfully produce it.
(3) We gained new ideas about ways to improve our project
Details:
First we introduced the background of our project:
Tyrian purple is a kind of dye extracted from sea snails called murices. It was first commercialized by Phoenicia in Tyre and was heavily used in Roman empire and other empires in Asia minor. Tyrian purple is replaced by other synthesis dye as the modern chemistry industry developed. However, due to its bright and everlasting color and environmental friendliness, Tyrian purple still has its unique value. Current chemistry method of synthesizing this dye is extremely complicated and has the common drawbacks of chemistry synthesis approaches: the low production rate and the high pollution level. Therefore we designed a biological approach to produce this dye. We can use the mass spectrometer to identify Tyrian purple.
Prof. Jin provided us with several piece of advice:
In the biosynthesis process, a flow chemistry approach could be applied, where different catalyst are localised on a column. When the substrate flows through the column, the reaction would occurs and the product would flow out from the other end of the column. The catalyst can be chemical catalyst, enzymes, or cells. This is a very refreshing idea. Our project required a two-cell system, and the handling process is complicated. Therefore, a flow chemistry approach might be fit for our project.
Interview about dyeing and designing clothes
Form: offline
Interviewee: Yajing Yuan, a graduate student from the University of the Arts London
Key Points:
(1) We learnt that purple dye that is wisely used now is not environmental-friendly.
(2) Purple clothes are very popular recently. The better it looks the more expensive it is. The color fastness and brightness also influence the price.
Details:
In this interview we focused on the current circumstances of purple dye on the market. Firstly, Yuan told us that the most commonly used purple dye on the market is extracted from petroleum. The dye, though cheap, is not environmental-friendly and the production process produces lots of waste water. We’ve also learnt that the price of purple clothes can vary according to the fabric, pattern, color fastness and brightness. Last year purple color was very popular among customers. According to what we’ve learnt we believe that Tyrian purple is marketable with its environmental-friendliness, color lastness and brightness. We gained confidence through this interview.
Part 2: Project Optimization
We designed a questionnaire about people’s knowledge concerning chemistry synthesis and biological synthesis of dye production.
Key Points:
(1)Most people have little knowledge about the production of dye.
(2)When it comes whether people can accept the biological approach of producing dye or not, most people hold an open attitude.
(3)More than half of the participants claim that they can’t accept the biological dye whose price is 25% higher than common dye.
Details:
418 participants in various age groups and with different jobs took part in the survey, which can insure the reliability of the result. The questionnaire tells us that we need to do more popularization about dye production. Besides, putting dye which are produced with microbiological methods into use is feasible due to the open attitude of the public. However, the usage of this kind of dye might be limited, only applying to luxury, because most people can’t accept the high price of biological dye.
Part 3: Public And Professional Engagement
Visit Tide Pharmaceutical Co.
Form: Offline
Interviewees: The CEO of Tide, Mr. Xie
Key Points:
At the beginning of our project, we were invited by Beijing Taide Pharmaceutical Co., Ltd. to visit their pharmaceutical factories in June. We as a team gathered at the gate of Tsinghua University High School on the morning of June 13th, and head on to the Taide’s basement in the Beijing Economic and Technological Development Zone. We have done some historical research before this trip, and were impressed by Ted’s profound deep culture. We, as the Tsinghua University High School students, are very excited to have an in-depth visit with a Sino-foreign joint venture targeted drug manufacturer. It is the first high-tech pharmaceutical company in China that can develop and produce targeted drugs and has its product on the market. After meeting with the employees, we were led to the ‘second factory’, where is a fully automatic warehouse that could store and collect the company’s medical products. Its environment's temperature, humidity, and the number of particles per unit of air are strictly controlled because of the need for the protection of the medicine. Later in the afternoon, we went to the R&D center of Taide Company to observe the process of medicine packaging by different high-tech machines. We listened to the lecture on how drugs are invented, produced, and tested. Finally, three students from our team presented the QHFZ 2021 team project to several TEDDER r&d scientists. In several professional comments, this activity successfully ended.
We learned a lot from this activity. One of the key lessons we took away from this fantastic trip was how we learned how to start a project from scratch. Taide’s experts tell us that brainstorming and social investigation are important links that we cannot ignore. If we have a good investigation basis, the success rate of our project will be greatly improved. Appreciate the good cooperation with Teide Company, which enabled our team of Tsinghua Attached High School to have deeper thinking about our project.
Details:
In response to the feedback and results we collected from our human practice. We modified our project design and our future perspective. First, we discovered that most people worry about microorganism remains in the clothing after dyeing. Especially we originally use E. coli as our host, and people may feat that it is a pathogen. In response to the public concerns, we decided to change our host from the commonly used strain BL21(DE3) to JM109. JM109 strain is a FDA certificated probiotic and is of no harm to human. We also discover that ordinary people cannot tell the different between distinctive strains of E. coli. Therefore we decided that in the future, we would implement our system into yeast, a more accepted bacteria to ordinary people.
Another big problem the industrial expertise mentioned is the process of dyeing. Even through the nature of our dye and the production process of it are all environmentally friendly. The traditional dyeing process is heavily toxic which involve a lot of additives to improve its fastness. And previously the low fastness is also a bottleneck for natural dye. Therefore, we developed a fermentation-dyeing procedure to overcome this problem. Our system used whole cell catalysis technique. And we put the cloth into the bioreactor while the fermentation process is proceeding. In this way, the cells are able to flow through and between the fabric of the cloth, and secrete the dye molecules into the fabric. This would make the dyeing process more efficient. And potentially increase the fastness.
At last, the biggest concern of our project is the cost, as traditional dye and colourants are mostly very cheap. The cost of synthetic biology dye is still extremely high. We are going to use bio-reactor or large volume fermentation cylinder to produce our product, as in large scale production could potentially reduce the overall cost. Also in bioreactor, fed-batch technique also the biomass to accumulate to 10 times of shaking flask.
