Difference between revisions of "Team:Concordia/Integrated Practices"

Revision as of 03:59, 15 October 2016

iGEM Concordia Wiki

Concordia's MicroGladiator project was developed as the microbial analogue to TV's Robot Wars/Battle Bots with the intent of providing a novel and exciting way for the public to engage with new biotechnologies. Interviews with the public helped us to better understand how people would react to, and want to interact with our project. We made the design choice to eliminate including any heritable weapons (with potentially unintended dangers) in our MicroGladiator toolkit and focus on nanoparticle-conjugates. Our nanoparticle-cell designs were then based off suggestions from our public interviews. From our early stages, we also examined the ethics in battling living microbes as entertainment. Because nanoparticles pose their own risks, we initiated a discussion with our institution on safe nanomaterial handling and created an SOP endorsed for potential institution-wide adoption. We followed up by writing an approachable mini-review on the environmental impact of nanomaterials, including those used in our project.

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-Nanoparticles are known to be potentially harmful for our health as well as the environment. In order to minimize scientists’ harm while handling nanoparticles, we created an <a href="https://2016.igem.org/Team:Concordia/Safety/SOP">SOP</a> which serves as a safety protocol as well as a reference to our various experiment protocols. In addition, we decided to get input from members of our community and make use of their ideas to render our project more appealing to the public and potentially enhance it. To do so, we interviewed Concordia University students on campus and we incorporated some of their ideas into our project.
+Concordia's MicroGladiator project was developed as the microbial analogue to TV's Robot Wars/Battle Bots with the intent of providing a novel and exciting way for the public to engage with new biotechnologies. Interviews with the public helped us to better understand how people would react to, and want to interact with our project. We made the design choice to eliminate including any heritable weapons (with potentially unintended dangers) in our MicroGladiator toolkit and focus on nanoparticle-conjugates. Our nanoparticle-cell designs were then based off suggestions from our public interviews. From our early stages, we also examined the ethics in battling living microbes as entertainment. Because nanoparticles pose their own risks, we initiated a discussion with our institution on safe nanomaterial handling and created an SOP endorsed for potential institution-wide adoption. We followed up by writing an approachable mini-review on the environmental impact of nanomaterials, including those used in our project.
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