Team:Tokyo Tech/Human Practices

Introduction

iGEM Team Tokyo_Tech has had outstanding projects every year especially in terms of experiments and modeling. This year, in order to develop furthermore, we had hold outreach activities positively from the beginning of our project. Also we had dialogues with the public and stakeholders to apply their advice to our project. Moreover, we had built this project, considering the contribution to society. Currently, synthetic biology is unfamiliar to the public, and in most cases, they cannot comprehend it easily. However, using Snow White story that everyone knows, our project is interesting and accessible. We did human practice activities to raise public interest in synthetic biology and to inspire the public to learn it with a familiar story, Snow White. What is more, our research about TA system and QS created “(ACA increase and decrease code)” and “(life and death of toxin-antitoxin wave on agar medium that controls protein expressions).” Additionally, we are doing the experiments of E. coli mutants that secrete proteins extracellularly. It makes a giant step toward technological developments in economy in the future.

Overview

Through communicating with the public, it was shown that people tend to have an erroneous idea about genetic modification and E. coli, and they have almost no idea about synthetic biology. Additionally, there is some advice that they cannot understand the contribution to society primarily. In order to solve those problems, we created a model called 3E model to find out the contribution of this project from three aspects: education, ethics, and economy. We are aiming to make our iGEM activity have an utmost contribution to society. Additionally, we summarized how the outreach activities, the lessons we gave and the dialogues with experts had made changes to our project, and what we thought with advice from them and what we did in chronological order. Moreover, Snow White in Grimm’s Fairy tales has a lot of versions published so far. Although we were not able to use experiments to represent all the different versions of the story, we were able to design a gene circuit.

3E

We take our project into consideration from three aspects: education, ethics and economy. From these three aspects, we can approach in various ways, thereby can grasp our project multilaterally. So far, we had worked on many activities to inform the public distinctly of E. coli, genetic modification and synthetic biology. Once we faced some issues, we had many discussions and also tried solving the problems. Secondly, we had thought about ethics as a key point in our project and made ethics code of iGEM 2016 team Tokyo_Tech. Furthermore, we coordinated activities to achieve the protein production control using TA system. Although it is difficult to use commercially at present, it is a great achievement that we created the idea and technology regarded as a steppingstone. This page shows all of our human practice activities.

Policy and Practices

We have communicated with the public and experts to proceed our project. Based on the advice from them, we had many discussions and have refined our project. This process enabled us to create a well-rounded project with the connection between the public and experts, keeping from our narrow view. This page explains the changes that some events had made to our project in chronological order.

Snow White Varieties

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