Team:BHSF/Human Practices
Introduction
In the project, we attempt to solve the problem of over-fermentation in home baking, and propose our idea to make our voice heard by the society and finally apply in home baking. Following the guidance of iGEM for Human Practices, we focus on issues that can help us improve our project and make it safer, more attractive for the home bakers. By interview with people from professional fields, conducting questionnaire, holding activities and attending meet-ups we refined our design and continued to improve the project as it developed.
Goal setting
The neccesity of timer yeast
and target clients
Why did we approach them?
After we first had the idea of inventing a timer yeast, we had to make sure that our project is valuable and learn more about fermentation. So, we interviewed the baker of ‘Palette’ and ‘Farina’, two famous bakeries in Beijing in order to acquire professional advice.
What did we learn?
We learned that the fermentation time varies a lot among breads, it can be as short as 15 minutes, or as long as three to four days. Professional bakers in bakeries control the fermentation time based on their experience, and because it is their job their to bake bread, they won’t be disturbed by other matters during fermentation and will not fail to stop fermentation on time. The two bakers both thought our idea to be interesting and unique, but advised us to focus on home baking or frozen dough industries.
Following the advice from the bakers, we investigated deeper into the industry of frozen dough. Frozen dough is commonly used by both home bakers and bakeries. It is commercialized dough that goes through the process of fermentation in the factory and is ready to go directly into the oven. The baker of Palette told us that during the process of producing frozen dough, in order to put the yeast into dormancy after fermentation, factories need to freeze the dough to a very low temperature in a short period of time. However, this process will destroy the taste and touch of the bread. Thus, if we can put the yeast into dormancy after a certain period of time, this yeast will certainly be welcomed by the dough industry.
Annika Shi also went to 2 bakeries that used frozen dough to make bread(Because this may affect the bakeries’ fame, so we decided not to mention the names of these 2 bakeries). She asked them about the process of making and using frozen dough, and the attitude of customers toward frozen dough. From our interviews, we learned that customers do care about whether the bread is made of frozen dough or not, and that frozen dough truly reduced the quality of the bread in a large extent, but they do not have a solution to this problem.
These investigations broadened our view in the possibilities of the implementation of our project, after these investigations, we set the preliminary goal of our project.
Preliminary goal setting
1.Focus on home baking and frozen dough industry
2.Kill the yeast after a certain fermentation time
3.Make fermentation time variable, a certain fermentation time for each type of bread
Project refinement
1.Interview with professor Liang
Why did we approach her?
Professor Jianfen Liang has been leading the researches in the field of food science and engineering more than ten years. She had guided and studied various projects related to food and nutrition, she is also included in the
National Science and Technology Support Program. Her professional suggestions would be very helpful and inspiring for us to improve our design.
Her suggestions
During the interview, we told Professor Liang that the method we designed to stop the fermentation is to let the yeast secret a toxic substance to kill itself. However, Professor Liang thought our design is lack of consideration about the health of the bread eaters because it is hard to tell what effect will the toxic substance have on the eaters. Even though it might not be harmful, some eaters will still have unwillingness due to the word “toxic”; they do not care specifically about what is “toxic”, since the the word itself means dangers to them already. Professor Liang thought the problems above might be a hidden danger for our product when it is going to be put on the market.
The suggestions from professor Liang was so important for us. Inspired by her advice, we abbandoned our original disign of killing the yeast by toxic proteins, rather, we chose to use auxotroph yeast so that we will only need to stop the expression of its complementary gene in order to terminate fermentation when the time comes.
When we finished our new design and asked Professor Liang again for her opinion, she was satisfactory with our improvement.
Notes of the interview
During the Q&A session, the team members enthusiastically raised questions. Mr. Zhu and Mr. Feng of Zeno Academy also discussed relevant issues with Professor Liang.
BHSF: What should be done to select and characterize the specific indicators of bread fermentation in place?
Professor Liang: It is unrealistic to characterize the bread mechanism by a specific index. Different flour and bread have different fermentation requirements, and processing and fermentation means are different, so it is difficult to characterize the degree of fermentation by a certain means and index.
Yan: Is there a kind of bread that is relatively suitable for this kind of experiment?
Professor Liang: Bread fermentation is greatly affected by flour. The quantity of gluten proteins are different in flour types, and the amino acid composition of different protein polypeptide chains are very different. Therefore, it is difficult to characterize yeast changes by a certain index in flour. It is suggested that the amount of carbon dioxide gas be represented by the amount of carbon dioxide absorbed by the material that can absorb it.
BHSF: The external indicator of dough is not very good as a standard, so can we find an internal indicator of yeast, which is closer to our current design.
Prof. Liang: It can be characterized by the concentration of yeast metabolites as an indicator.
BHSF: How to better control the changes of yeast activity during the fermentation process of bread.
Prof. Liang: During fermentation you want the yeast to accumulate, you don't want it to produce a lot of gas, you want the yeast to accumulate, and you need to determine how much it fermented depending on the bread. In the final fermenting stage, a high temperature and humidity environment is given to regulate the accumulation of metabolites and emulsifiers are added to adjust.
BHSF: Do you control the fermentation process according to the time?
Prof. Liang: In industrial production, time is usually taken as the standard. Industry and family have two different processing requirements and systems.
BHSF: How can yeast enter into dormancy or start up quickly in the process of fermentation?
Prof. Liang: The environment of yeast can be regulated through physical and chemical methods, so that it can be quickly dormant and inactivated or quickly started.
In the end, Professor Liang introduced some technical conditions needed to enter the food laboratory, and recommended some food enterprises' production practices to publicize the popular science base. Thanks to Professor Liang, who also invited us to be a guest at China Agriculture University.
2.Bio fair
Our team collaborated with Keystone Academy to hold the Syn Bio Fair on September 19th, 2020. The purpose of the fair is to introduce synthetic biology and genetic engineering to the public. The team Keystone, IBOWU-China, UCAS-China, BJ101HS, RDFZ-China also attended the fair. We introduced our projects and promoted synthetic biology on the fair. We also exchanged opinions on our projects with members from other teams.
During the fair, many visitors showed great interest in our project. We also found that many of them troubled by failure to make breads, overfermentation and insufficient fermentation are common among home bakers.
We explained our design in a form that most people can easily understand: for example, two groups of people playing tug-of-war as an illustration for the mechanism of toggle switch. The number of people is more in one side than the other side, so the switch remains the “off” state. When the galactose opened the “door” which the door represents the start of the synthesis of opposite protein, people get in the door to help the weak side in the tug-of-war game. Soon, the side become stronger than the other, turning the switch to the “on” state. In the conversations between our team mates and the guests,
We realized people are troubled not only by overfermentation, but also by insufficient fermentation, when the fermentation time is not long enough. Our Khronos yeast can also solve this problem by setting the time of the switch in a specific value.
We also figure out a big problem of the application of our project: the untrust of genetic engineering in the public. Many people do not trust the technology of synthetic biology and believe that operation on genes can cause health problems (cancer is the most common rumor). Spreading the positive information of genetic engineering is another thing we have to do. Not only us, but also the teams around the world.
To this end, we designed a series of promotion for synthetic biology, as mentioned below.
3.Meetups
(1)4th Southern China Regional Online Meeting
We submitted a delicate PowerPoint document and project overview to The 4th Southern China Regional Online Meeting. In the vote stage, due to the fantastic preparation we made and the standout communication of answering and discussing the suggestions and concerns from our audiences, many teams got inspiration. The experiences we shared and the future plan we made also received the comment as “super helpful. Moreover, this presentation also won the prize of “the best presentation” in this meeting.
Our gains
1. In this meet up we mainly shared about the experimental experiences with other teams and listened to their experience during experiments.
2. After the meetup, we established a WeChat group chat for teams to communicate. Henceforth, teams have been posting collaboration requests, activity promotions, and important announcements in the group chat, maintaining active cooperation.
3. We received the concerns of food safety when we mentioned we wanted to use toxic substance to kill the yeast. One team thought it might be better to make the yeast’s gene not to be expressed so that some of the proteins cannot be produced anymore, which gave us a bright and inspiring idea on our design.
4. By attending the meeting, we got a lot information about iGEM this year and other teams.
(2)Beijing International iGEMer Collaboration Seminar
This meet up is an online seminar between different iGEM teams. Teams shared their ideas, discussed needs, and gained opportunities to collaborate with each other. Professionals in synthetic biology and other related fields as well as award winning iGEM teams were also invited to give each team feedbacks and help.
There were 11 teams attending the meetup. The high school teams were BHSF, BJ101HS, BNDS_China, JNFLS, KEYSTONE, Nanjing NFLS, NFLS, RDFZ-China and QHFZ-China. Besides, we also invited two undergrad teams to join us. They were Tsinghua and BUCT-China.
Our gains
1. Other teams pointed out some shortcomings of our project, made some suggestions on experiment, presentation and human practice, which are instructive in making further improvements. In the meetup, our project deficiencies were noticed, and suggestions provided by participants greatly help us to improve our project.
2. We received the suggestions about how our design can be applied in the process of secondary fermentation.
3. We received the suggestions about modeling from NFLS.
4. We got a human practice resource about bakery front RDFZ-China.
5. In this meet up we translated our previous presentation into English. It is very helpful for us when we were making our promotion video.
Project refinenment
We have redesigned the genetic pathway of the yeast’s DNA, introduced the toggle switch model to stop the fermentation to replace the “toxic” plan. Moreover, the toggle switch model is actually more suitable fore our future design about the controlling the yeast start and stop it’s secondary fermentation automatically in the doughs, and that is what’s never going to be achieved if we choose to use the “toxic” plan.
Promoting our project
The goal of promotion
Many students in our school are unfamiliar with synthetic Biology, they thought gene engineering is very far from them and had little interest, not to mention primary school students.
We aimed to show them the beauty of synthetic Biology, how to use it to solve problems in daily life, therefore help the public build a positive notion towards GMOs from young,
What’s more, we also wanted to get advice and suggestion for our projectfrom our classmates and teachers.
What did we do
1.Promotion in our school
We planned series of lectures and activities related to synthetic Biology and gene engineering in our high school.
We’ve already done an activity introducing gene engineering and our project, we designed some questions related to these knowledge and did the prize-giving quiz with the students.
The students told us they learned lots of new things about biology and genes, and they hoped we can provide more activities like this.
We also learned that many students and our teachers also bake at home, and they had problems of over-fermentation just like us, this showed that our yeast is necessary. Our teachers also gave us lots of encouragement. We gained confidence from these series of lectures and activities.
The students told us they learned lots of new things about biology and genes, and they hoped we can provide more activities like this.
We also learned that many students and our teachers also bake at home, and they had problems of over-fermentation just like us, this showed that our yeast is necessary. Our teachers also gave us lots of encouragement. We gained confidence from these series of lectures and activities.
2.Synthetic biology lecture
in primary school
We held many lectures in Beijing No.2 experimental primary school, we introduced some basic concepts and usage of gene engineering and Synthetic Biology to the primary school students.
We used our project as an example to tell the students that gene engineering can be used to solve problems in our daily lives and it’s very close to us. Many primary school students were pretty interested in our lectures and asked us lots of questions about these topics after the lectures, they also told us they want to learn more about genes after they enter middle school.
Questionaire
Why did we conduct this?
To learn about the attitude of public, to see people’s concern or suggestion, to make sure the value and necessity of our project.
What did we learn?
The general attitude towards our project is positive, people thought our project was intersting and useful.
People have safety on food safety as we had expected, so we need to think about how to ensure food safety and to show people they are safe.
Communication with bakers
After our promotion video got famous on Bilibili, many bakers contacted us and discussed our project with us. They provided us with many factors that affects time needed for fermentation of bread, gave us some new insights in our project.
We also told them about the Biological knowledge related to yeast and fermentation, and helped them translate some baking textbooks(since most of these books don’t have a Chinese version)
Group chat for baking-lovers
Many of our fans on bilibili also love baking, so we set up a group chat on Wechat inviting our fans who were interested in baking to join. We shared the principles of fermentation, living conditions for yeast, skills and tips in baking and various special recipes we figured out by ourselves with our fans.
We shared the knowledge and information nearly once a week. The number of members in our group chat reaches as many as 150, our fans shared their experience actively, many of them had the problem of over-fermentation, we could feel their depression from failures in fermenting through their text message. Through our questionnaire, they also express their needs and feelings in baking to us.
