Team:METU HS Ankara/HP/Gold
Introduction
One part of iGEM that we really enjoyed was human practices. While working on our human practices, we went beyond the lab, gained more information about the topic we selected, received feedbacks about our project, and also understood if our project served public interest or not. We received lots of feedbacks and suggestions that had a huge impact on shaping our project, and helped us on the journey. We had the chance to collect information regarding the ethical, safety, social issues about our project while doing these human practices.
Colon Cancer Conference and Meeting with Colon Cancer Experts
After we decided our project topic, we needed to get some information about colon cancer so we attended a colon cancer conference where lots of professors about cancer talked about cancer, prevention of cancer and cancer treatments. In this conference we had a chance to explain our project to professors and take their advice. With these professional advices we were able to improve our project.
SURVEY
Then,we prepared a survey to learn about people’s eating and exercise habits. We implemented our survey to 531 people. The results were as expected but not in a good way. We found out that many people don’t have a healthy diet and don’t exercise regularly. Furthermore, we realized there was a correlation between exercise and alimentation to colon cancer. This survey’s aim was to learn about people’s eating and exercise habits, its correlation to cancer and determine if people have a positive or negative attitude towards synthetic biology. More detailed survey results are as followed:
45,4 % people said that they consume vegetables, fruits and whole grains more than five times a week. As fruits, vegetables and whole grains are fibrous foods and they help with butyrate production. Thus, they are very good for colon health.
Red meat consumption has negative effects on the colon flora. The percentage of people who consumed meat was very high. And 63.6% of people consumed meat more than 3 times a week, which is a very high frequency.
Dairy products help the production of butyrate, so it has lots of benefits to our colon and also other parts of our bodies too. So, we asked people that ’’How frequently do you consume dairy products? ‘’ And 52,7% said that ‘more than 5 times a week’.
Fish are rich in healthy fats and protein, and contain essential fatty acids. Thus they have lots of positive impacts on our bodies. However the consumption of fish is very low and not very frequent. 9.2% said that they never ate fish, and 43.6% said that they consumed fish only once a month.
After that question, we asked people about how frequently they consume probiotics, and 9.2% of them said never. Lack of probiotics can cause problems in the intestinal flora, including colon cancer.
One of the most critical question was about smoking, we asked people if they smoke or not, and 80,2% of people said no. Smoking has lots of negative effects on our body, triggers cancer and it’s bad for colon health. So these results made us really happy!
Additionally, we asked them: “How frequently do you consume alcohol ?’’, and 50,3% of them said occasionally, while 32% said never.
Then, we asked people about how often they exercised and 36% answered “less than 3 times a week”. Exercise is very important in order to protect ourselves from diseases, including cancer.
Also, because we work on cancer, we wanted to know the amount of people affected by cancer. So, we asked people: “Do you have any relatives who are diagnosed with cancer in your family?” and 52,2% answered yes, while 47,6 answered no. This shows us how a prevalent type of disease cancer is.
Besides, curiosity brought our team to this specific question ; what is the type of cancer do these people have ? And then we saw that, 17.8% of people had relatives diagnosed with colon cancer. This data showed us that colon cancer was one of the most common types of cancer.
We also asked some questions about synthetic biology. Firstly, we wanted to know people’s attitude towards synthetic biology. And we got some gratifying results! 33.7% answers were positive.
Then, we asked; "If you were diagnosed with any illness, would you consider any treatments/ drugs that has been manufactured by synthetic biology?". 86,8% of people said yes. This shows that the majority have a positive attitude towards synthetic biology. This question also enabled us to understand that if our project was applied to real life, majority of the people would support it and maybe even use it. So the results made us very happy.
However, when we asked people how much do they know about synthetic biology; 60.3% of them answered ‘’Nothing at all ‘’. this answer inspired us to inform us about synthetic biology that they trust even if they do not know what it means. Answers to this question inspired us to make human practices to explain what synthetic biology is, and how it can be used.
Discussion Sessions with Assoc. Prof. Sreeparna Banerji
After reviewing literature on colon cancer, we asked Sreeparna Banerji for her advice, since she works on the effects of Butyrate inhibition on colon cancer for many years. We discussed our project with her regularly and got the chance to shape our project according to her feedbacks. We have centered Butyrate in our project treatment and further research were carried on after these discussions.
