Difference between revisions of "Team:UESTC-software/Integrated Practices"

The project we designed, BIO101, as a DNA information storage system, perhaps can revolute the storage means. For almost every person uses storage tools every day, we got inspiration from the public, and also, we sent feedback. That is what we did in our human practice, and how we integrated them to our project.

Initial Inspiration

The idea of DNA information system came from our lecture in Puyang Middle High School. During that time, we led children to design their own plasmids with special functions, which enlightened us that DNA can store the entire biological information. Therefore, the ability of DNA to carry information, inspired us to use it to store more type of information. That’s the beginning of our idea, we want to continue to explore the content of DNA information storage, making it a real software product.

Collect Advice

In order to make the software design more in line with public demand, we investigated the attitudes and expectations of people to DNA information storage from the user needs.

At the beginning of the survey, we found that many people felt fearful to biology. One interviewee said that he would not use any products that used genetic technology. When hearing that we were going to use DNA to store information, she misunderstood that we were going to change its genetic makeup and strongly opposed to it. But after our patient explanation, she understood the pattern of our project and put down concerns to support it.

Slowly, we were getting better. People put forward higher expectations on all storage capacity, device size, and storage speed. When we briefly introduced the idea of DNA storage, some of them showed great interests, and that made our idea that use DNA to be information carrier firmer. At the same time, they concerned much about portability, readability, and information security. The investigation and interview led us to consider more and deeper.

Function improvements

After initial design had completed, we took part in the iGEM Southwest China Union meetup. The meeting brought four colleges, in other words, three experiment teams and a software team together. We displayed projects one by one and discussed advantages and some other that we could improve. For the difference between software and experiments, our point was focus on synthetic biology knowledge. Teachers and students cared about DNA storage capacity, also attached great importance to the process of the transformation of numbers to the DNA sequence. As to consequence, we thought along their advice, and changed ternary system to quantenary.

Future Blueprint

Sometimes, we might have imprisoned in knowledge we had learned. But the natural curiosity of children could make them have new ideas. Dreaming about the future of our products, we wanted to add more functions to keep up with the pace of times. In " To Be Scientists Tomorrow”, we discussed the problems of DNA information storage with children. Sometimes their ideas sound powerful and unconstrained style, but some novel ideas pointed the way for us. For example, carry-on, not easy to damage, which inspired us to design microfluidic chip to store DNA, leaving out organism preservation process.

Children are the future of the motherland and the development biological business also needs them. Let them contact with this knowledge from a young age and think about problems, which is also a good thing for them.

Display and communication

After the basic completion and improvement of the project, we brought our achievements to Chongqing, participating the meetup held by The Third Military Medical University (TMMU). The meeting was mainly to prepare for the final show in the United States. According to the competition procedure, we made presentation and poster presentation. We leaded the audience into the DNA storage world through our presentation. After the interpretation, many teachers gave credit for our project, but also put forward some suggestions to us. Project features presentation, DNA storage process were not clear, which should be paid attention to. We noticed that the introduction of software for audience should be clear and with emphasis.

Fortunately, we caught up with the 60th anniversary of our school. We availed ourselves of this opportunity of school innovation results display, to show our project in such a platform to the alumni from all over the world. Many alumni have been school teachers or staff. Their knowledge of information storage. We probed into the change from digital storage mode to DNA storage, imagined digital computers to biotech computers, and even the development of quantum computers. They said our project had a lot of prospects for development, encouraging us to make persistent efforts, bold to do it.

Bio101 and human practice were promoting each other all the way, step by step forward. We got inspiration source from human practice, and served to people reversely. We popularized new knowledge to public, also got useful information from the public. Only develop the two together can we make our project achievable and practical. Let our Human Practices, more profound and meaningful.