Team:SCAU-China/integratedHP
Preface
We have completed a series of great human practices!
Human practices help us complete our project and extend our thinking on how to change the world. In order to make our projects more closely match the actual needs, we interviewed stakeholders in different fields such as the public, experts, enterprises, and governments, and received feedback from different perspectives, and adopted reasonable suggestions for project improvement. At the same time, we also actively promote the concept and knowledge of synthetic biology to social science, covering elementary schools, middle schools, universities, and social people and other age groups, and have received positive feedback from them.
Expert interview
In April this year, we contacted Professor Zhao Fangjie through the "South China Agricultural University-Molecular Plant crop Science Frontier and 11th Guangdong Zhonghengshan High-end Forum". Professor Zhao Fangjie is an authoritative expert on the absorption of Chinese metals by plants and the remediation of contaminated soils by plants in the School of Resources, Nanjing Agricultural University. He gave our team advice on the absorption of heavy metals by plants and was certain about our Chlamydomonas project.
Our discussion with Professor Zhao Fangjie has provided great help for us to build synthetic biological solutions in our current efforts to solve the problem of heavy metal pollution in water. Professor Zhao Fangjie shows that it is innovative to use Chlamydomonas to fuse and express the metal binding protein from Sedum sedum, which can effectively solve the problem of long cycle and high cost of repairing Sedum sedum with mine. And hope that we can extend the restoration of the water environment to the soil.
Finally, we consulted Professor Zhao Fangjie about the superiority and future value of the bioremediation environment, which shows that bioremediation is different from physical and chemical remediation. It does not add other ingredients to the soil and change the physical and chemical properties, so bioremediation is mild and easy to accept.
Ecological Environmental Bureau
In order to make our project have the best design to solve local problems, we have an online communication with the Guangzhou Ecological Environment Bureau. After listening to our project introduction, the staff said that our ideas are very novel and support the follow-up of our project. At the same time, he also put forward the following suggestions to us: In practical applications, we should consider whether our process of placing and recycling genetically modified organisms has an impact on the ecological environment, and how to solve it? Consider the cost and time of operator training, device production and maintenance, salvage and recovery, etc. These comprehensive factors determine whether we can achieve the project in society.
At the end of the meeting, they suggested that we should go to the heavy metal sewage treatment plant to conduct on-site investigations to obtain references for the above problems, and we also carried out the next step of human practice.
Enterprise access
In order to better guide our project, we went to Guangya Metal Rubber Products Co., Ltd. and visited their production workshop and sewage treatment plant. Through communication with engineers, we learned that sewage from similar companies mainly contains inorganic and organic pollutants and heavy metal pollutants, especially cadmium and nickel. Their heavy metal wastewater treatment technology is mainly physical and chemical methods, through adsorption, precipitation, filtration, ion exchange and other processes to make the concentration of heavy metals in the wastewater to get the national discharge standards.
However, because they will add lye in the sewage treatment, which may pollute the environment after discharge, and the entire treatment process requires a lot of energy and space, which makes us even more expecting to design a unique device combined with our Chlamydomonas, use less time and space to solve the problem of heavy metal pollution.
At the end of the visit, we also took samples of sewage before and after treatment for laboratory testing to verify whether our Chlamydomonas can be used in a real sewage environment.
Device upgrade
In order to better use our Chlamydomonas in the real environment and get the requirements of biosafety, we designed a device. In the process of human practice activities, we have upgraded the device many times, which greatly improved the practicability, safety and cost of the device. Please refer to the hardware for detail.
