Team:UCSC/Human Practices

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Integrated Human Practices

Intro

Our team recognizes that to successfully combat STEC we needed to understand the food production pipeline inside out. Food production does not just impact the consumer, but also the businesses dedicated to packaging and distribution of produce. Because of this, we were curious about how individual ranches have been affected by food recalls, what measures are being used to protect cattle, and how well a new product or treatment would be received.

After preliminary research, we had conflicting viewpoints on whether our project should target cattle or produce in order to find the best way to eliminate STEC in its entirety. At this point we were also unsure about how to engineer a system to successfully solve the issue at hand. This led us to contact synthetic biologists, local farms and ranches, sanitation companies, agricultural pathogen researchers, and physicians throughout our project to make sure that every question or doubt would be answered by someone who has valuable insight on various aspects of the system.

For details on our interviews, click the names underneath the photos!

Inspiration for Progenie:

How do we put our plan into action?

Amir Zarrinpar

Amir Zarrinpar

Sam Sternberg and Leo Vo

Sam Sternberg and Leo Vo

Hearing from Farmers:

What effects are field specialists seeing first hand?

Pomponio Ranch

Pomponio Ranch

Pacific International Marketing

Pacific International Marketing

Taylor Farms

Taylor Farms

Professional Opinion:

Where do we fit in the industry?

Vaxxinova

Vaxxinova

SmartWash Solutions

SmartWash Solutions

Birko Corporation

Birko Corporation

Expert Advice on Pathogenesis:

How does it spread and how do we stop it?

Dr. Joji Muramoto

Dr. Joji Muramoto

Gregory Gilbert

Gregory Gilbert

Implementations in Healthcare:

How can we make a difference outside the agricultural sector?

Dr. Jeannine Rodems

Dr. Jeannine Rodems

Next Steps for Progenie

While taking testimony from potential stakeholders and agricultural pathogen researchers, it became apparent that the issue of targeting STEC effectively is multi-faceted; there are disagreements on who is responsible for preventing food contamination within the chain of transmission, and solutions such as cattle vaccines already exist to slow the spread of STEC through manure. This led us to reconsider the scope of our project with hopes to find a novel solution that could realistically be applied in the real world. Luckily, our plan to disrupt stx2 based on a specific guide sequence can be altered to target other genes, allowing the impact of our project to expand beyond one foodborne pathogen. A further application of Progenie that we want to explore is targeting and eliminating antibiotic resistance genes. This system would be adapted to gram-negative bacteria, which have a similar conjugation machinery to STEC, making the propagation and conjugation of Progenie replicable. See more about the specific bacteria we hope to targethere!