Team:Nanjing high school/Human Practices
Human Practice
Project background
In the modern era, lots of problems in our life are associated with bioscience majors. The most essential issue—food insecurity—is within the scope of our consideration because food is the basis for our everyday life. As a result of the rapid increase of the global population, we are committed to attach plenty of importance to the effective output of food.
In order to explore our potential research topic, we set up interviews with the farmers from the Nanhui Orchard in Shanghai, which was a farm producing plenty of peaches. After some discussions, we realized that there were several important issues that really deserved our attention.
Originally, we thought that farmers only utilized a very small amount of phosphorus fertilizer for their crops. However, after a short interview with Mr. Liang, our mind changed dramatically. They were required to apply all kinds of fertilizer to their peach trees in April, May, June, and October, and the total mass of fertilizer was up to 540 kilograms each year. According to the Chinese price of commodities, they needed to spend at least (equal to) 4285.71us dollars for just one year, which was an extremely heavy financial burden for average farmers in China. Additionally, farmers we had interviewed with were also dissatisfied with the effect of their phosphorous fertilizer. Temperature in summer is usually very high, so a large proportion of fertilizer vaporizes in the air, which leads to a very serious waste with potential health risk to local residents. Plus, heavy rain in the southern part of China is also a threat to the effectiveness. Consequently, a prototype of our research topic appeared in our minds—what about inventing a method to revolutionize the usage of fertilizer?
For the sake of gaining further detail of our potential topic, we paid a visit to Professor Wang, a respectful botanist in the Chinese Academy of Sciences. After hearing our primary ideas, Pro. Wang told us that we could choose the symbiotic relationship between plants and phosphate-solubilizing bacteria as our research topic! Phosphate solubilizing bacteria (PSB) are beneficial bacteria capable of solubilizing inorganic phosphorus from insoluble compounds. P-solubilization ability of rhizosphere microorganisms is considered to be one of the most important traits associated with plant phosphate nutrition. What’s more, Professor Wang pointing out that we were able to enhance the power of this bacteria by engineering its genes—forcing this sort of bacteria to depend on the salicylic acid, only secreted by plants for survival. Therefore, because phosphate solubilizing bacteria must rely on salicylic acid after the gene modification, the relationship where bacteria depend on the acid to survive and are bonded to the roots can be established. The plants can absorb countless benefits from this bacteria.
Education and Engagement
Overview
With regard to public engagement and education, we introduced our project and vision of synthetic biology and environmental protection to the public online and offline, aiming to raise the social awareness of water eutrophication and the importance of phosphorous in the industry. We conducted multiple activities, using easy-understanding concepts and interesting scientific experiments, and drew the attention of a crowd of people interested in science and inspired more peers’ love to explore relevant projects. Hence, we realized that the scientific project should be acceptable and comprehensible to the public.
Introduce our project to peasant
Spot: Orchard Village, Xinchang Town, Pudong District, Shanghai
Date: 2020.8.8
On August 8, 2020, we visited Orchard village to communicate with the peasants who live there. These peasants have lived in Orchard village for hundreds of years with their families. Also, most of the residents there planned peaches and vegetables annually. We had planned to communicate with them about the local fertilizer and introduce our project with them, which can help us have well known about the need of peasants and what kind of product that they needed to further develop our project.
We visited the peasants’ home and their farms in order to have a basic knowledge of the local situation. Then we discussed with several peasants about their peach orchard and introduce our project. since the peasant who lived there usually use organic fertilizer and little phosphate fertilizer. Our project focuses on increase the absorption of phosphate fertilizer, which also has some link with them. Most of the peasants mentioned that they are interested in our product and would like to use the finished product from our group. We exchanged our idea with local citizens and shared different views of our project. This helped us gain different opinions from the various status of people.
For WeChat Official Accounts:
We have created an Official Account on the WeChat in order to let the public know what we “rePhos.” are exactly doing. Every day, one to two passages were uploaded by our team members through Official Account. Each article is about what we do in the lab and what we do in the office. (Picture below is two reports on what the team number did on August 8 and August 9)
Besides reporting our daily routine merely, we also did some knowledge popularization through the WeChat Official Account. Since we were conducting a project of genetic engineering, it was certain that the average readers did not have much professional knowledge of that. So we also wrote some articles about genetic engineering to make sure we could be easily understood by every reader, no matter what job he/she did and how old he/she was
Besides reporting our daily routine merely, we also did some knowledge popularization through the WeChat Official Account. Since we were conducting a project of genetic engineering, it was certain that the average readers did not have much professional knowledge of that. So we also wrote some articles about genetic engineering to make sure we could be easily understood by every reader, no matter what job he/she did and how old he/she was
We have created accounts in multiple platforms. Our contact e-mail address and all the QR codes of our official account on different platforms such as Bilibili and Tiktok are put in every passage. Readers can follow or contact us on different Apps.
Live broadcast to introduce about project to the public
Spot: Tiktok, Suburban District, Shanghai/Bilibili
Date: 2020.8.8~2020.8.16
During our group visit to the Orchard, we also had a live broadcast to propagate our program to the public and introduce ourselves to Bilibili live later. We first described our project to the public and each member introduce ourselves on Tiktok. Then we walked around the suburb to introduce different planets such as corn and maize. After that, we show the process of taking our advising video.
After we came back to the office, we had another online live broadcast on Bilibili to propagate our group to the public again. This time, we introduced some basic knowledge to the audience. We discussed with the audience and invite them to join us. On the next day, we read some professional papers in life to help the audience be more familiar with our project. When reading the papers, we even communicated with the audience by bullet chat and show our office room to them. The public was able to get the latest information about our project just by our live, which district the gap between our group and the public.
From August 11, 2020, to August 16, 2020, we sent our group memento to our fans to improve the relationship between us.
The live broadcast helps our group to expand our reputation and communicate with the public.
Education project in Kang Jian Community Sports Park
Spot: Kang Jian Community Sports Park
Date: 2020. 8.14
Kang Jian Community Sports Park is a well-known recreation facility in Shanghai. To introduce some basic concepts of synthetic biology and phosphate-solubilizing bacteria to people of all ages, we went there for our education program.
First of all, we introduced iGEM to them. The audience was really fascinated by the interestingness and professionalism of this competition and were willing to attend iGEM in the future.
Then, we shared some fundamental facts about phosphorus and symbiotic relationship. We discussed the necessary need for phosphorus for every living thing and the harmful effect caused by excessive phosphorus in the soil. Some senior listeners immediately pointed out peanut and nodule bacteria as examples after hearing our explanation of the symbiotic relationship, and everyone easily accepted our later presentation about phosphate-solubilizing bacteria.
Last but not least, we introduced our products, PSBTM, to our audiences, including the principle of PSBTM, application, and how they are going to affect our everyday life.
In conclusion, throughout our efforts in public engagement, education, and integrated human practices, we successfully promoted our project to the public group. It rendered us with an opportunity to contact with the public, and we found that most teenagers considered our project significant and they would like to conduct further study. Additionally, through the internet, we also made advantage of social media, including live streaming about our project on BiliBili and TikTok, community publicity, and broadcasting WeChat articles (involving our process and scientific promulgation). Consequently, we gained crows of fans willing to learn and promote our vision further. Thus, we not only promoted our project but raise public awareness about phosphorus in the industry. We determined to carry on our synthetic biology project continuously, and the inspiration would be passed down to more people through our promotional activities.
Social Research
We choose an online survey to do our research mainly because of the COVID-19, as it is safer for all of us, either us or the respondents. In addition, in the modern era, fewer people are willing to spend their time on data research on the street. With the on-line data collector, the respondents can answer our research in their fragmentary time to finish our research. Our entire data collector was built on the internet. The respondents can finish it within seconds, without wasting their time stopping on a hot summer day near an LBT.
We interviewed Professor Wei, he gave us some constructive advice on our project. Firstly, if we got enough time, we should consider adding a soil application experiment for our project. Because the bacteria may perform well in the lab, and they may fail to survive in a real situation. A real soil situation can help us assess the overall solubilizing ability, so when we introduce the product to the market, we can ensure the outcome is similar to the theoretical one. Secondly, the final product can be modified to a toothpaste-like form. According to the professor’s advice, a toothpaste-like form is stable (the bacteria can be active) in the transportation and storage stage. Finally, we need to do some field tests. The professor pointed out that salicylic acid is not only produced by the root of the plant, but the acid can also be produced by other bacteria. We should test in a different type of soil first to confirm that they can hold the co-existence relationship in a real situation.
After interviewing Professor Yu, we gathered some useful information about phosphorus. Phosphorus is an important factor in terms of environmental protection and so is hydrogen. Elements, like these mentions above, can be harmful to the environment if entering the water in a large amount. Water itself can not consumer away from the energy, so the algae will take that excess energy away and grow, and contaminated the environment. We also learned that we show to test the bacteria, in order to prevent issues like bacteria being replaced by other stronger bacteria that can not finish the process. Phosphorus is harmful to the environment if not being used in the correct way, bacteria being used in the lab should be tested a lot of time, to prevent further issues like other bacteria engulfing the bacteria that should have been used.
Wechat: Search "rePhos" in WeChat