Team:Shanghai high school/Implementation
Implementation
Explain how you would implement your project in the real world
• Who are your proposed end-users?
Our products are suitable for the detection of baby products to protect the health of mothers and infants, and can also be used for direct water pollution detection or agricultural water detection. However, based on a series of activities of dialogue and consultation with the professor, we found that environmental hormone not only exists in baby products such as pacifiers, but also exists in food and clothing of the public, and has a certain impact on the public, so our products are suitable for the public concerned about health.
• How do you envision others using your project?
Based on the current public's attention to personal health and family health, we think we can take this customer demand as the starting point. We believe that our project can be developed into an environmental hormone detection kit, which can be used for household, government，and enterprise users to carry out environmental hormone pollutant detection in various scenarios.
For other research groups, ER sensor protein can be further improved and optimized on based our results, to obtain better detection sensitivity or stronger detection signal, or have the detection ability for other compounds, to broaden the detection range of our system.
• How would you implement your project in the real world?
We hope to develop the results of the project into an easy-to-use test kit. It can be provided to household users for the detection of maternal and infant products, or the government and enterprises for the detection of estrogen pollutants in a series of environment such as open water, agricultural water and so on. The kit may contain lyophilized ER sensor protein, suitable reaction buffer and ONPG reagent added for color reaction. The above reagents can be mixed with water samples soaked in plastic (milk) bottles or sucking cups, and the presence of estrogen pollutants can be determined by the bright yellow by naked eye.
• What are the safety aspects you would need to consider?
1. The liquid in the container is neutral, cannot be used for other purposes.
2. The container cannot be used upside down
3. Do not damage the container and add other liquids to the indicator
4. There are 2 kinds of indicator: for the E. coli one you have to sterilize the indicator first in case the E. coli won’t harm the environment; for the normal protein one, you can just dump it with the container into the trash can, they’re all safe!
5. Seek medical attention immediately if swallowed the indicator
6. If it contaminates the skin or eyes, rinse immediately with water and seek medical attention
7. Check the container before using it, do not use it if damaged
8. For the E. coli indicator, you can store it under normal room temperature; for the protein indicator, you have to store it at 4 ℃.
• What other challenges would you need to consider?
We believe that the biggest challenge is to make the public aware of the widespread existence of environmental hormones pollution and its harm. On this basis, how to avoid contact with such pollution and reduce the impact on health. For our project, the challenge lies in how to make the public trust our products, how we contact manufacturers to produce the kits as well as how our products pass the quality inspection, etc.
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