Team:XJTU-China/Human Practices
Overiew
In this year’s human practices, we took diverse kinds of activities to promote the development of our project and make our contribution to the world.
In the preparation stage, with the talk to Dr. Chen Xiaopeng, we had a general understanding of the current situation of insomnia. The interview with Prof. Zhang Yali guided us to think of the idea of designing a milk machine with the function of producing tryptophan itself.
For our implementation stage, the interview with Prof.Xu Dan and Dr. Liu Ziqiang provided us with precious suggestions for our wet-lab suggestions, which helped us to solve the problems we came up with during these periods.
The talk with Dr.Zong Yeqing benefited us a lot in polishing our design of hardware during the application stage. And the investigation we did enabled us to view the application of our projects from the perspective of our proposed users.
On top of these, we also endeavored to make broader contribution to the public by holding diverse kinds of meaningful activities like lecture about synthetic biology, debate competition focused on bio-safety and ethic even delicate postcards providing nutrition knowledge.
All In all, our various HP activities benefit the whole stages (inspiration, implementation and application stages) of our project. Furthermore, it also contribute to the public and the world
Content
Inspiration and background investigation
Overview: In the preparation stage of the project, we carried out a wide range of background investigations to confirm the feasibility of using tryptophan to release the pain of insomnia. We interviewed with Prof.Zhang Yali, in order to find out the possible ways of using tryptophan to cure insomnia. After the deep interaction with Prof.Zhang, we decided to explore the possibility of using milk as medium to help people absorb extra tryptophan. And to make the step further, considering the background of epidemic, the idea of constructing a domestic milk machine to fulfill our goal attracted our attention successfully. Meanwhile, we were honored to have a deep communication with Dr. Chen Xiaopeng, who had much experience in curing patients with mental health problems like sleep disorder. The talk covered a lot of useful contents: from the current situation and therapies of insomnia, to the feasibility of using tryptophan to cure insomnia. Dr. Chen even inspired us to do some popularization of science to introduce the insomnia and its solutions towards public.
I. Interview with Prof.Zhang Yali
In order to understand the anxiety problems and sleep conditions in the context of the epidemic and to learn to choose the suitable medium to carry our tryptophan, we interviewed Prof. Zhang Yali from the School of Life Science of Xi'an Jiaotong University.
Prof. Zhang introduced us the interdisciplinary intersection of microbiology and food nutrition with the fermentation industry as the core, affirming the broad prospects of microbiology and synthetic biology.She mentioned that under the social background of epidemic, making difference to people’s diet is more safer and convenient. Pro. Zhang alos discussed with us the selection of engineering bacteria and explore the value of tryptophan in various applications.
At the same time, we were also glad to know that tryptophan has much wider application in diverse area than we used to think, which can be used to help people release their feeling of anxiety and depression. And further investigations proved this idea.
With the guidance and suggestions, we chose to use food medium to carry our tryptophan, and would focus on the issues of product acceptance and safety came up with idea to use milk reserved in a domestic.
Under the circumstance of recurring epidemic, mental health problems caused by reduced socialization, like increased anxiety and widespread sleep problems receive much attention from the public. And due to our goal of helping people solve these problems by making difference to their diet, we actually need the interaction with expert in the area of nutrition and food health. Luckily , our team had a chance to interview Pro. Zhang Yali from the School of Life Sciences at Xi'an Jiaotong University, who has profound knowledge of nutriology. We realized that we can meet human health needs with the help of food nutrition and microbiology, while gaining a deeper understanding of our tryptophan project.
Prof. Zhang has long been engaged in microbiology and food nutrition research, so she began by introducing us the most central part of the intersection of the two fields: the fermentation industry supported by the microbiology discipline. For the purpose of producing natural products using genetic engineering techniques, there are both advantages and disadvantages compared to the direct use of chemical synthesis. At present, there are more than 80 polypeptide drugs available worldwide, which are obtained by three methods: chemical synthesis, genetic recombination and plant or animal extraction. There are still extreme challenges in the process of developing new polypeptide drugs. Meanwhile, the strict regulations to their application are supposed to be considered.
In the post-epidemic era, individuals are paying more attention to their own health conditions. Prof. Zhang believed that this trend provides a broad prospect for the development of microbiology and synthetic biology, in order to meet the needs of the public. And microorganisms have pivotal impact on human health. First of all , microorganisms have coexisted with humans for a long time in our intestinal, oral and skin flora, which have a long-lasting and stable impact on human homeostasis and immunity. On top of that, microorganisms can also affect human indirectly by influencing our living environment. Therefore, the research in the direction of the human microbiome is also crucial to be further explored.
Finally, we and Prof.Zhang focus on the design and idea of our project. In terms of hardware design, Prof. Zhang suggested us to grasp the selection of engineered bacteria to ensure the sensory properties of the product and its curative effect are accepted. At the same time, tryptophan, as a precursor substance ,may not be as effective as melatonin in the short term. But as a component of food and more importantly, the essential amino acids for human life, its longevity and organism stability are much better. Moreover, tryptophan is involved in numerous metabolic processes, and the injection of it is of great clinical value in treating diseases like hypertension and depression. Combined with iron and vitamins, tryptophan can intervene in locomotor anemia; the combination with histidine can treat peptic ulcers. Therefore, the prospect for the application and development of tryptophan is really wide.
With the guidance and advice of Prof. Zhang, we learned that tryptophan has a broad application prospect, at the same time,we needed to focus on product acceptance and safety issues in hardware development.
II. Interview with Dr.Chen Xiaopeng
In order to gain insight into the causes and treatment of insomnia today and explore new ideas for sleeping aid, our team contacted and interviewed Dr. Chen Xiaopeng, Deputy Chief Physician of the Department of Neurology at the People's Hospital of Jiangnan University.
We consulted Dr. Chen about the main factors that trigger insomnia, the characteristics of patients in clinical work and the treatment methods used at present. He provided us with the related information with his own clinical experience, which helped us have a comprehensive overview of the current situation of insomnia.
At the same time, Dr. Chen affirmed our team’s idea of using tryptophan as a sleep-aid molecule produced by a household device. And he also gave suggestions for solving the insomnia problem among young people, which inspires us to do more popularization of science related to mental health to the public.
Through this interview and investigation, we gain a new comprehension of insomnia and determined that the home-based production of tryptophan will be realized through synthetic biology and home-based hardware design.
By distributing and collecting the questionnaires about the degree of insomnia of the public, we come to a conclusion that insomnia is a general and common situation in the present society. Therefore, in order to gain a deeper understanding of the causes and solutions to improve the current insomnia situation, we interviewed Dr. Chen Xiaopeng, Deputy Chief Physician of the Department of Neurology at the People's Hospital of Jiangnan University, and discussed the feasibility of our project using tryptophan as a nutritional supplement. Through this interview and research, we learned a lot about the causes of insomnia symptoms and the ways to treat them.
First, he introduced us the factors that cause insomnia in nowadays society. In terms of the objective reasons, individuals’ age, gender, family history and personality may contribute to insomnia. From the point of subjective side, some individuals get into insomnia due to the disruption of their life rhythms, while some others are forced by competitive pressure from their work or life. Meanwhile, Dr. Chen told us that the proportion of adults suffering from insomnia in mainland China is as high as 57%, with the majority of chronic insomnia patients seeking medical attention concentrated in middle-aged and elderly people, while young people are not as willing to seek medical treatment when they develop insomnia symptoms.
Dr. Chen has also provided valuable suggestions for our project. He mentioned that the standardized therapies for chronic insomnia at present include psychotherapy, pharmacotherapy, physiotherapy, Chinese medicine, and integrative treatment. And our team's choice of using tryptophan as a nutritional supplement belongs to over-the-counter medication in pharmacotherapy. Although the clinical application of tryptophan is controversial, a recent Meta-analysis by the National University of Singapore on the effect of tryptophan on sleep disorders indicated that adequate supplementation of tryptophan can significantly reduce the time to fall asleep. As a consequence, the direction of our project is worthy of trying and exploring.
Finally, Dr.Chen offered some suggestions to prevent insomnia for today’s youth. To start with subjective causes, many surveys have shown that common triggers of insomnia among students include excessive use of electronic products such as cell phones, smoking, drinking alcohol or milk tea, learning pressure and emotional instability. Therefore, Dr. Chen suggested students to pay attention to overcoming these factors in their lives. In addition, scientific research also indicates that melatonin secretion in the human body starts at about 9:00 pm and gradually decreases to stop after about 12:00 pm. The gastrointestinal motility of the digestive system stops at about 10:30 pm, which reminds us that we should arrange the pace of life reasonably.
Implementation
Overview: When it came to the implementation stage, the talk with Prof.Xu Dan provided us with lots of precious suggestions in designing and carrying out our wet lab experience. During the process of experience, we came across lots of problems that we were not able to deal with. As a consequence, we consulted our instructors or advisors frequently to find ways to solve these obstacles effectively and pushed the project forward. And it absolutely included Dr. Liu Ziqiang, who has engaged in the area of tryptophan fermentation for almost seven years. He offered us not only the information of cutting-edge progress made in tryptophan fermentation, but also some essential technical suggestions to polish our wet lab design, like the choice of model organism and resistance, the optimization of fermentation conditions and the purification of tryptophan to make it as clean as possible.
III. Interview with Prof.Xu Dan
We conducted a communication in HP with NWU-CHINA-A team, and jointly interviewed Associate Professor Xu Dan of Xi’an JiaoTong University to deeply explore the application of synthetic biology in the project.
Prof. Xu answered our concerns about the success of exogenous gene expression in host microorganisms in synthetic biology project, and introduced the current challenges regarding the application of synthetic biology methods to achieve industrial mass production. She also convinced us that synthetic biology has broad application prospects and more specifically, she provided us with suggestions during our wet-lab experience.
In the next step, our project would continue to focus on the purification of synthetic biological products and yield issues.
Our team had a communication with NWU-CHINA-A team about HP. And we interviewed Associate Professor Xu Dan from Xi'an Jiaotong University. Prof. Xu has specialized in the field of microbiology for many years, and during the cooperation, we clarified the promising application of bacterium production of tryptophan, and gained further understanding of the key points for bacterium production.
First of all, Professor Xu introduced us a problem in synthetic biology projects nowadays: whether exogenous genes can be successfully expressed in host microorganisms. The main reasons exist in the situations like codon preference, toxicity of the exogenous gene expression product, and structural differences in the protein expression product among species. Fortunately, there are some corresponding technologies to these situations. Then, Prof. Xu answered our questions about the application of synthetic biology in achieving industrial mass production. Although industrial mass production needs to take factors like gene component assembly, splicing and expression product selection, expression efficiency evaluation, expression product purification, etc into consideration, it is a topic with great potential and investment value. So, it is worthy of time and energy we spared to learn and master. Finally, Prof. Xu stressed that synthetic biology is a field with lots of "down-to-earth" inventions that will benefit our life in a comprehensive way. And in the future, the achievement in synthetic biology will continue to gain popularity and attention in real life for its convenience and wide-spread use.
Through the interview with Prof. Xu, we have a better understanding of the field of synthetic biology. In our project, we will continue to focus on the purification of synthetic biology products and the yield issues.
IV. Interview with Dr.Liu Ziqiang
In order to solve the problems concerning fermentation device design and learn more about tryptophan production, we consulted Dr. Liu.
Dr. Liu eagerly shared with us the information about the specific experimental process, some notices in fermentation process and the possibility of using periodic bacteria package, with his own experience in the research of fermentation of tryptophan. On the premise of ensuring the high quality and continuous production of tryptophan, Dr. Liu gave us some suggestions on the design of fermentation devices and evaluated our crafts for machine. We also discussed the current situation, improvement in efficiency of tryptophan large-scale industrial production.
After conversation with Dr. Liu, we gained an in-depth understanding of the main points in the fermentation experiment and the industrial background of the project. Furthermore, Dr. Liu's guidance on hardware also had great significance.
To gain an in-depth understanding of the key points of the fermentation experiment, we interviewed Dr. Liu Ziqiang, an expert in fermentation from Bluepha Lab. We gained more understanding of the industrial background of our project. In addition, Dr. Liu's guidance on hardware also benefited us significantly.
First of all, Dr. Liu reminded us to pay attention to the sterility of the fermentation system, including raw material sterility, process sterility, and the fermentation cycle for thoroughbred culture. Therefore, more stricter regulations should be applied to the control of substrate nutrition, intermediate process, the medium, and the process of conditional parameter control.
For the "tea-making mode" we mentioned (to use recyclable replacement of the bacteria package) Dr. Liu thought that the operation is more complex than we expected. Considering the tiny size of E. coli, the aperture of required membrane should meet the requirements of 0.2 to 0.3 microns to prevent E. coli from entering the beverage liquid, which subsequently leads to the challenge of separation process. Secondly, in the design of fermentation device, Dr. Liu suggested considering the compatibility of function and volume. However, the current problem is that the material transport between different accessories in the device mainly relies on pressure differential method and pumps, so it’s hard to achieve the goal of “both small and multi-functional”. Apart from that, striking a balance between costs and consumers is quite hard. If high techniques are used, it undoubtedly leads to increasing price, which is hard to accept by customers.
Finally, he talked about the present situation of tryptophan production. Amino acid products, as a food additive, have been widely used in the field of food and health care with huge demand and market. Specifically, the maximum annual production of the company with mature tryptophan fermentation technology is about 10,000 tons. However, after purification, there is a 20% to 30% loss in tryptophan fermentation liquid, which leads the total conversion rate stay at about 10%, far less than that of glutamate (60-70%). The key to improve tryptophan fermentation technology is to improve strains we use. Selecting more appropriate strains can largely improve conversion rates, releasing burden of purifying.
Application
Overview:In the application stage, we tried our best to broaden the prospect of our project. After the talk with Dr. Liu Ziqiang, we decided to try to pay a visit to fermentation factory. And finally, we contacted with a alcohol fermentation factory to get some experience of bacteria fermentation. With the original design of our hardware, we made connection with Dr. Zong Yeqi. Dr. Zong evaluated our designs and pointed out the potential challenges. On top of that, he eagerly gave us much advice to help us make our design more reliable and user-friendly. He also mentioned that it would be better for us to polish our hardware if we can carry out public survey to collect first-hand data. As a result, we did a public survey to evaluated the current situation of insomnia, as well as the acceptability of our hardware design. The outcome of the survey showed that public awareness of insomnia needs to be strengthen. And surprisingly, nearly 95% of investigated population held an open mind to our hardware and were willing to try it if the technology is mature enough.
V. Interview with Dr.Zong Yeqing
In order to gain an in-depth understanding of the hardware development later in the project, we discussed our hardware design with Dr. Zong from BluePha.
To start with, we discussed the feasibility of achieving what we had already designed with Mr. Zong, and asked Mr. Zong how to choose the form of final product (hardware). He pointed out some key factors we need to consider during our design process, like whether our hardware is user-friendly and cost-efficient. Some obstacles in technologies are hard for us to overcome, which made us to polish the design of our machine. Also, we gained the suggestions for our Human Practice, to help us gain the attitude of public toward our design.
Through discussions with Mr. Zong, we have a deeper understanding of the hardware design and development, which is of great importance in home-based hardware design. And we also planned to carry out a survey relayed to our project to collect more ideas and possibilities.
In order to gain an in-depth understanding of the hardware development later in the project, we interviewed Dr. Zong from Bluepha Lab and discussed our design ideas for creating a hardware of tryptophan producing. First of all, Dr. Zong gave his advice on the feasibility of fermenting drinks through portable device and then extracting tryptophan to make drinks. He explained that bio-fermentation is still a main source of producing tryptophan, so what we need to focus now is selecting strains with high productivity, which subsequently leads to the maximum tryptophan yield.
In addition, Dr. Zong taught us the reasonable methods of analyzing the feasibility of our hardware. First, we need to know the highest concentration of tryptophan at present, and then design strains and systems based on it. Next, the hardware should be designed from this point of view.And finally, we should analyze the results and causes. Secondly, Dr. Zong talked about the need to design hardware products from the angle of customers, as far as possible to meet the needs of miniaturization and simplicity, that’s what we call user-friendly design. Also, designing the hardware originally, being innovative and making improvement based on the previous version are vital.
Surprisingly, Dr. Zong also gave us a few suggestions for doing HP. First, members in Hp group needs to demonstrate the importance of our design for everyday life and industrial production. The second suggestion is adding more field trips into HP activities, which can help us accumulate enough data and increase the credibility of our design. In short, through the conversation with Dr. Zong, we had a deeper understanding of the design and development of hardware, which is of great importance in home-based hardware design.
VI. Visit to the Shaanxi Qinyang Changsheng Liquor Factory
In order to address the issues during the fermentation of tryptophan including bacterial contamination, strain passage and product purification, we decided to pay a visit to the related factories. But the restriction of epidemic had a great impact on our plan. After contacting for a long time and considering the possibility, we went on a field trip to tour the Shaanxi Qinyang Changsheng Liquor Co., Ltd, to find the similar methods we may apply in our projects.
We interviewed Mr. Wang Ping and Mr. Wu Dongping there, and drew on their experience concerning technology used in industrial brewing process.
First of all, we visited the whole production line with the staff’s guide. Mr. Wang and Mr. Wu pointed out that the qualified personnel, the control of technological skills and equipment sanitization are the requisites for contamination avoidance. In addition, since fermentation is literally a process with complex mixtures of various microbes, it is not realistic to circumvent all the pollutant. We also gained insight into the separation techniques and the way to maintain microbiological stable (by controlling the key strains in different techniques). Furthermore, to ensure the quality of fermented products, it is vital to create a condition (temperature, humidity etc.) suitable for microbes.
Mr. Wang and Mr. Wu also pointed out that one of the main research directions in this filed is removing the mycotoxin, which is potentially responsible for contamination out of the fermentation system, though Qinyang Changsheng Liquor Co., Ltd doesn’t have a process relating to it.
VII. A survey about insomnia and public’s attitude toward our design of hardware
A survey was carried out to understand the sleep status, problems and people’s attitudes towards microbial fermentation of producing sleep-aid products and home production instruments. The respondents we surveyed were all ages, with a total of 1,020.
Obviously, the information we collected from the public actively polish our design ideas and reveal the potential obstacles we may face when we try to make our design down to earth. What’s more, the result also helps us to precisely evaluate the market need for our hardware, in order to make our project go further.
The result about sleep quality of people shows two problems
1. More than half investigated individuals are suffered from sleep problems:
Fig.1 Whether people had problems about their
sleep in the past few months
Fig.2 the sleep loss frequency for people who
sufferfrom insomnia
More than 60% of the respondents have insomnia in the past month, more than 60% of them suffered from insomnia over 3 times in a month, and more than 20% of them suffered from insomnia over 9 times in a month. Long time of falling asleep, poor sleep quality and short sleep time are common problems for insomniacs. And according to Pearson-related analysis, sleep status is not related to age or gender, which means that people of all ages suffer from insomnia. (The results of the analysis are detailed in "Relevance between gender, age and sleep status")
2. The traditional treatment of sleep problems has achieved little success:
Fig.3 Different methods to deal with insomnia and
their
effect
Although a great deal of people suffer from insomnia, only 17.97% of these people have tried to treat it. And the survey results show that hospital visits, drug sleep aids, physical sleep aids, and popular sleep aids account for only about 15% on average. It can be seen that most insomniacs' sleep problems have not improved after treatment.
The result about microorganism fermentation show two results
Fig.4 People’s understanding of microorganism and
fermentation and its use in nowadays society
1. People know little about microbial fermentation of producing drugs
According to the surveys, only 17.63% of people have a certain understanding of Escherichia coli's ability to produce drugs, and only 9.86% have a certain understanding that tryptophan has sleep-assisting effect. According to the Pearson-related analysis, there is a positive correlation between the acceptance of sleep aid products of microbial fermentation products and the understanding of Escherichia coli and tryptophan (see "Acceptance of microbial fermentation and understanding of bacteria and tryptophan for details of the analysis results).And the acceptance rate is also positively related to age and the attempt to treat insomnia (analysis results are detailed in "Analysis of Microbial Product Acceptance and Age). It shows that more knowledge about microbial fermentation drugs and insomnia treatment needs to be popularized to people to improve acceptance.
2. There is a broad prospect for Tryptophan produced by fermentation in aiding sleep:
According to the survey results, 61.74% of the people have tried to solve insomnia through dietary therapy, and about 90% of people are reserved and acceptable in the face of sleeping-aid food produced by microbial fermentation. It can be seen that most people may accept food containing fermented tryptophan to improve sleep. Producing Tryptophan by fermentation within a domestic machine is worth trying and will have its own audiences
The investigation about hardware show a tendency
1. High acceptance of domestic machine to produce Tryptophan:
Fig.5 People’s attitude toward the domestic
machine that could be used to produce tryptophan
Fig.6 Main concerns for people to consider when
they choose these kind of machine
According to the survey, if the technologies are mature enough, nearly 95% of the people choose to accept and show willingness to purchase and try the household production instruments. The three most crucial aspects of instrument design are safety, price and function, accounting for 66.63%, 57.78% and 45.33% respectively, which provides us with a direction for designing our instruments in a more custom-oriented way. And after the analysis of Pearson correlation, we can safely conclude that there is a significant positive correlation between accepting household instruments and eating to regulate sleep and receiving microbial fermentation products to help sleep, indicating that using household instruments to ferment tryptophan production for the treatment of insomnia has a wide audience . ( For details of the analysis results, please refer to the "Relationship between Diet to Sleep, Microbial Fermentation Attitude and Receiving Instruments")
It was worth mentioning that we were glad to take an active part in many meetups dyring each of our stage. In the preparation stage, we joined the meetup held by NWU-China-A to share our idea about the program we were going to do. During the implementation stage we took part in the meetup held by JNU and the national meetup: CCIC, both of the meetings enabled us to share our experience and exchange ideas about the problems we met.
Further publicity
Our effort were absolutely not limited to the project itself because we endeavor to make more positive influence on the nowadays society. This year, we focus on mental problems like anxiety, insomnia and depression and basic knowledge about nutriology. As a consequence, diverse types of activities are planned and carried out to impart healthy lifestyle to people, which we think is more important than just doing the project itself. Lectures towards different age of students, debate competition, brochure, hands-on experience, all of these let us find more possibilities to enlarge the meaning of our project and we are always eager to try these new things.
1. Lecture for High School Students about Synthetic Biology and iGEM
It’s our expectation to enhance the public’s comprehension of synthesis biology, therefore, we sought an appreciable opportunity to organize a lecture about synthesis biology and its technologies for high school students. More than demonstrating the basic theories and technologies of bioscience, during the lecture, we’d like to discuss how bioscience had contributed to the development of the society.
To achieve our goal, we introduced the basic philosophy and technologies of synthetic biology. Meanwhile, we discussed the development, prospect as well as the existing controversy of synthetic biology in order to arose their cognition of bio-safety and bioethics.
On this basis, we demonstrated the overview of iGEM to them and those novel and valuable projects from previous competitions. We not only did enlighten the youngsters’ awareness of bringing improvements to the world, but also lead them to understand the responsibility they ought to shoulder.
2. Summer Camp Activities——Go to Laboratory
We are dedicated to introducing bioscience to kids and cultivating their active attitude towards science and their interest to exploring the nature. Therefore, we decided to organize summer camps activities for high school and elementary school students.
At the same time, we also taught high school students to do an experiment of painting with fluorescent E.coli to get them directly fascinated by the charm of experiment, through which they would gain not only technique, but also the comprehension of the beauty of bioscience.
During the summer camp, we guided them into advanced laboratories of synthesis biology in order to illustrate synthesis biology and its real-word applications. While visiting the lab, we introduced them the standards of operation in the lab and its significance, as well as iGEM, which is the top competition in the realm of synthesis biology, guiding them to explore the joy of ameliorating the world with their own hands.
Moreover, we organized a mini-brainstorm to guide them to consider how to make use of biotechnology to bring benefits to the society. They were quite immersed into the activity, coming up with a plenty of brilliant ideas, for instance, utilizing good germs to kill bad germs to cure inflammations and simulating the circumstance inside the gut to produce Dog Coffee, an analog to Cat Coffee. We expect to stimulate their active thought and their interest to synthesis biology, and ultimately, guiding them to be the next generation of iGEMers!
3. Debate Competition
It is a good way to attract the general public’s interest by carrying out novel popular science activities about hot issues. Considering the needs of effective knowledge spread, interesting science popularization, thought-provoking discussion topics and so on, we conducted a debate competition with the theme of "Is gene editing a good news or disaster for mankind?" for college students.
During the race, debaters showed audiences plenty of details about gene editing technical, laboratory research and commercial conditions, advantages and possible risks over traditional biotechnology, and also ethical issues that cause public concerns. We planned to help the audiences to view gene editing and other techniques in a more scientific and holistic way, at the same time, help them understand the benefits and potential risks of synthetic biology.
4. Lecture of healthy life for Primary School Students
We actively share our social responsibility to pay back the kindness we received from the society. As a consequence, we take an active part in carrying out the activities about the popularization of science and bring the idea of healthy life to the public. And according to the review with Pro.Zhang Yali before, we have agreed on one issue: to prevent health problems, no matter psychology or physiology, preparing individuals with appropriate knowledge about these problems is quite important. While kids at their age of 12-13 are actually in the key stage of growing, we are supposed to equip them with the idea of living a healthy life, both physically and mentally.
5. Postcards about Nutriology
Because we try to make difference to people’s diet in order to improve release their mental health problems, knowledge about nutriology is also essential. As we hope to interact with a population as large as possible, we plan to compile some materials that are easy to spread among the public, such as brochure painted with cartoon characters and popular science information.
And we think highly of lingual expressions. We are dedicated to explaining convoluted scientific concepts with concise expressions without losing the core. Our designers take into account the relativity with the information we hope to convey while designing each of the pictures. The knowledge of alimentology will become more accessible if combined with attracting illustrations on our postcards.
