Team:TU-Eindhoven/Human Practices
An important part of the iGEM competition is policy and practices. In this part, societal aspects of synthetic biology are integrated in our project. This is really important because without involving society in synthetic biology, synthetic biology will never be able to come out of the labs. The policy and practices part of our team is divided into three parts: Application scenarios, outreach and safe by design.
The scaffold proteins that we designed us have various applications. To illustrate the variety of the applications of our new scaffold proteins, three possible application scenarios were designed. For each application scenario it is explained why our scaffold could be useful. The application scenarios are: Kill Switch, Industrial Coenzyme Regeneration and Transporter Bacteria.
The main goal of our outreach is that the knowledge people already have about synthetic biology are connected together. In a brainstorm session, we concluded that most people already have at least a tiny bit of knowledge about synthetic biology. This knowledge could be something which is learned in school, something that is read in the newspaper or even something on social media. This was implemented by creating a synthetic biology course for high school students and by presenting synthetic biology, iGEM and our team at public events of our university and creating animations about synthetic biology for the general public.
Together with the RIVM, safe by design was discussed. Safe by design means designing in a way the outcome is inherently safe. Our team did a stakeholder identification and made an animation about safe by design and how it is integrated into our project and the Dutch GMO policy.
