Team:JNFLS China/HP
Exhibition at Shandong Science & Technology Museum (SSTM):
Public awareness of Alzheimer is our final goal to make our think and design to be real. Out of that purpose, exhibitions were held at Shandong Science & Technology Museum. Since we began with introduction of Alzheimer in previous activities, this time we want to see how well people are familiar with Alzheimer, and how synthetic biology and our project can make life better. We also reevaluated the chance that our project can come into real with statistic data we gained during this activity.
Public Survey of Awareness of Alzheimer's Disease (AD):
We introduced the mechanism underlying our project- synthetic biology and iGEM to people filled the survey, out of the purpose to make synthetic biology and our competition more well known, as well as to investigate whether they still willing to try after they know what they would use. Surprisingly, most of people, nearly 98% of them still willing to try our new diagnosis method, and the fear of genetically modified products is go away: now they know that evolution and natural selection procedure are what we mimic, it is harmless to publics if we use it.
Visiting elders/staffs in Tiansi Nursing Home:
Stakeholders' usually can offer us unique approach to rethinking and reevaluating our design and prospect product. Through our visit, the need of developing more understandable system was bring about, which prompt our Device 2.0. Public acceptance of synthetic biology products and our proposed diagnosis method were also being evaluated.
Interview with doctor in Qilu Hospital:
The situations are not optimistic, medical conditions are having problems both on diagnoses and treatment (can only be effective in delaying disease course). Since most old people cannot accept the idea of getting CSF (cerebrospinal fluid) through one’s spine — not to mention the sequel on the patient’s life, CSF is no longer used anymore. Cerebral CT and more precise Magnetic Resonance Image are presently used to detect the extent of atrophy in hippocampus.
Device 1.0 to Device 2.0: From Negative to Positive Correlation:
According to our initial version of system, when miRNA chosen as biomarker reached a detectable level in the bloodstream, fluorescence emitted by GFP would be interrupted and thereby the fluorescence would be disappeared. However, such a negative correlation, though having the lowest cost and most likely to be put into mass production, the negative results come from our design is hard to be understood by elders when we tried to explain how to interprete results from our system to elders. With the hope to make our results easier to be understood to them, our second version of system was designed.
Re-discussion with Our PI: Born of Device 3.0:
After all these activities, with the more mature thought about where our design would be used, we discussed with our PI, Professor Tian again to find out if there is any technique problems may hindered our actual application. Therefore, Professor Tian guided us to design the version 3.0 of our system to achieve easier observation of our results.
JNFLS exhibition:
We set up an iGEM club at Jinan Foreign Language School because we hope our passion for Synthetic Biology could be passed on, and iGEM team of our school could continue to participate the competition in the next season.
