Team:IIT-Madras/Human Practices
Contents
HP Silver
Our country, India has been progressively adopting GM crops, which has led to a heated debate in our country. This prompted us to investigate GMO related issues by reaching out to its stakeholders, the general public (consumers and farmers), NGOs and regulatory authorities.
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HP Gold
Once we had finished the survey, we realised we needed the opinion of the other stakeholders in the GMO debate:regulatory authorities and NGOs. We believe an informed decision can be made only when everyone is heard, and their views carefully contemplated. We proceeded to perform Education and Public Outreach based on the knowledge we gained from the survey and interviews.
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Education & Public Engagement
Our country, India has been progressively adopting GM crops, which has led to a heated debate in our country. This prompted us to investigate GMO related issues by reaching out to it's stakeholders, general public (consumers and farmers), NGOs and regulatory authorities. We conducted a survey among undergraduates, graduates and professors (330 responses) of colleges in four states of India. We interviewed two highly vocal NGOs, Gene Campaign & ASHA, and two members of GMO related decision making government body. To educate farmers about GM crops and its implications, we prepared a write-up in their local languages, and circulated it among farmers using social media. In order to spread awareness in public sphere about Synthetic Biology, we made a mobile game 'Codonut' (released on the App Store and the Google Play store) to educate players about the concept of codon bias. We also organised an interactive synthetic biology session for students in a high school near our campus and primary school students in a village in Maharashtra.
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Codonut-a game
We were fascinated by the concept of codon bias, which forms the basis for the modelling aspect of our project. We wondered if we could teach this concept with the help of a fun mobile game. We believe games can truly help people of all ages understand core concepts underlying day to day phenomena in a lasting way. This was how the game was born.
In the game, the player guides the ribosome character by tapping on the screen(thus lifting him up). The player must not hit the upper or lower bounds of the playing area(represented by the lipid bilayer). As an analogy to codon bias, we decided to use donuts, with ribosome preferring chocolate donuts above all others(who doesn't love chocolate?). If you have yet to play the game, you can download it on the App Store or Play Store.
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Safety
Experiments were conducted in the undergraduate lab of the Dept. Of Biotechnology at IIT Madras. The lab conforms to the standards for a Bio-safety level 1 lab according to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention,Atlanta. Most members of our lab team also have had extensive wet lab experience previously. Read more...
