Team:SCAU-China/HP/Silver
Silver
Our human practice work involved several questions relating to biosafety,social justice and public acceptance.Our aSTARice is actually a genetically modified organism,so our work focus on people’s concern about GMO (genetically modified organisms) .
1. Improve ourselves
First of all,we should make sure that we ourselves have correct understanding on this question.For this reason,we took part in lectures about transgenic.
The first lecture was given by Jianping Kou, who is director of the Department of “genetically modified organisms safety management and Intellectual Property Office” from “Department of Science, Technology and Education” in MOA(Minstry of Agriculture) of China, and Min Lin, who is director of Institute of Biotechnology of CAAS(Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences). In this lecture, we got to know that transgenic foods, that are saling in market are absolutely safe. For they were tested by associated departments and labs for many years in scientific ways. And up to now, there're only a few kinds of transgenic products have gotten permission into Chinese market. After lecture, we communicated with these scientists about new technologies on transgenic research.
Apart from that, we've also took part in a talk given by Yongning Wu, who is the director of "Key Laboratory of Food Safety Risk Assessment, Ministry of Health", which belongs to China National Center forFood Safety Risk Assessment (CFSA). In this talk, we obtained a lot of informations in analysing GMO.
As we are working to create a new kind of crop, we think we should also know more about agriculture, so we joined in The Sixth Asian Conference on Precision Agriculture as voulnteers.
2. Innovative and venture talk
As most undergraduate students are having no idea about how to do a biological project, we made a talk on innovative and venture talk held in our college. We gave a speech about our two projects and ways to do biological research, such as how to get paper from some databases and how to communicate with professors. Our talk attracted more than 300 students, most of them are impressed by our fantastic ideas.
3. Laboratory open day
As many of freshmen in our college are eager to learn more about lads and biological research, we took the charge of laboratory open day for freshmen in our lab. We led our freshmen students to visit our lab,introduced equipments' function and showed our team video and posters. For many students, it's their first time to visit an advanced biological lab, so many students were strongly impressed by our well managed lab.
Several months later, a group of high school students from many famous middle schools in Guangzhou came to visit our university. Our college decided to open our lab for visiting, and we took charge of this open day again. We tried our best to make this open day a success activity, for the reason that many of those young high school students might be impressed by this experience and make their decision to work in science and engineering in the future.
4. Making guideposts
Our university has quite a large campus, which contains several districts,so it is normal that visitors get lost in our campus. To help new students in finding their directions,we made many "iGEM guideposts" and placed them in different corners of our campus. We want to provide convenience for others.Meanwhile, we also want to popularize scientific knowledge.
5. Making biological graffiti
Many students of our university reside in dormitory which is far away from the main campus. If we want to go to our lab or library, we have to cross a culvert,which is dark and boring. In this year, College of art of SCAU ( South China Agricultural University ) sponsored an beautification of this culvert. We participated in this activity and painted a part of this culvert. Our graffiti showed out a big plant cell and its ultra-structure.
6. Making iGEM video
To most college students, science is always not as attractive as sports or computer games, but why can’t we show science in a cheerful and colorful way? For this reason, we made this video to introduce our team and synthetic biology in a simple way.
7. Risk assessment
As our project is using the rice as a bioreactor to produce astaxanthin, and we also hope that aSTARice can serve as a kind of food in human’s daily lives, so we are very concerned about the safety of aSTARice.
We believe that risks are mainly embodied in the following two aspects : one is that the encoding products of marker genes might be toxic and allergenic potentially for human or livestock. Antibiotic gene might be transferred into gut microbes’ genome of humans or animals, increase the resistance of the microbes of the antibiotic, thus result in reducing the effectiveness of antibiotics in clinical treatment ; the other one is that marker genes could be spread through pollens or other methods into other organisms, which is called genetic drift. Genetic drift can transfer antibiotic genes to weeds or other plants,which is threatening the ecological environment.
In order to reduce the effects of antibiotic marker gene, we use a technique called selectable marker-free technique in the project, so the final aSTARice is an marker-free transgenic plants(MFTPs). We design a Cre-loxP based side-direct recombinant system to knock out hygromycin phosphotransferase gene, minimizing the effect of the selectable maker gene.
In order to reduce the risk of genetic drift as well as the threat to the ecological environment, we add isolation area to surround the experimental fields. By isolating the transgenic rice, we reduce the possibility of genetic drift duel to the transfer of the pollen, sufficiently guaranteeing the safety of the project. Whats more, we are also analyzing coding products by HPLC and trying to make sure that there is no harmful products in our rice.
Rice was chose as the chassis though it isn’t included in the white line, but we checked-in with the official website in the beginning. Because we are the first team who choose rice as chassis, we have to asses the safety for rice.
Rice is the self-pollinated plant so that the gemotype in the individuals is pure and homogeneous. The probabilities that two flowers take place cross-pollinated are just 1%，and the distance of the spread of rice pollen is hardly beyond 1 meter.
The phenomena of pollen escape are the main ways which lead to the flow of exogenous gene of transgene plants. Recently, the reaches of transgene plants verified that the exogenous gene of transgene plants will flow to the same species or weeds and even the conventional species. As igemers, we took safety into consideration carefully so that we saw plentiful papers, and that we found a conclusion that under the close distance less than 1% adjacent non-genetically modified plants take place gene flow. If we increase the distance to 5~10 meters, the probabilities decrease to 0.001%~0.0001%, which will not happen in theory. when planting rice, we follow seriously the safe regulations of transgene plants so we have faith that it is impossible for gene flow come up under this plant distance.
8. Laws®ulations
The credibility of the policy about “aSTARice” transgenic rice project:
8.1 The world health organization
In 2002, the world health organization claimed in "20 questions about genetically modified food". All of the genetically modified products as so far in the international market have passed the risk assessment by the national authorities. These different assessments in general follow the same basic principles, including the environment and human health risk assessment. These assessments are transparent, they did not show any risk for human health.
8.2 The United Nations
The United Nations food and agriculture organization in 2003-2004 in "the food and agriculture condition report” clearly pointed out that the current existed modified crops and food is safe, the method used to test its safety is appropriate. So far, there is no safety accident caused by eating genetically modified crops. Millions of people eat the food derived from genetically modified crops, mainly maize, soybean and rape seed, but did not find any adverse effect.
8.3 The European
In 2009, the transgenic group of European food safety authority set out an authoritative scientific opinion about herbicide resistant and insect-resistantcrops that in terms of impact on the environment of human and animal health, gm is the same safe as non-gm, without any harm to health and the environment.
8.4 The United States
In 2010, the United States national academy of sciences claimed in “the influence on American agricultural sustainability ”. In general, compared to traditional agriculturaltechnology for American farmers, genetically modified has created a huge environmental benefits and economic benefits.
The world health organization, the United Nations food and agriculture organization, the us food and drug administration and other international organizations and authorities have said the current approval of commercialization of transgenic food is safe and edible.
8.5 China:
The Chinese government attaches great importance to the management work of the safety of agricultural genetically modified organisms, has formed a set of law which is suitable for China's national situation and consistent with international convention of laws and regulations, technical regulations and management system. As a result, it has achieved remarkable resultsin accordance with the implementation of safety management.
( 1 ). The legal system: the agricultural genetically modified organisms safety management regulations, the measures for the administration of agricultural genetically modified organisms safety assessment, the safety measures for the administration of import of agricultural genetically modified organisms, the identification measures for the administration of agricultural genetically modified organisms, the agricultural genetically modified organisms processing measures for examination and approval, the inspection and quarantine measures for the administration of entry and exit of genetically modified products.
( 2 ). The administrative management system: joint inter-ministerial meeting, agricultural genetically modified organisms safety management leading group, the provincial administrative department of agriculture, municipal (county) level administrative department of agriculture.
( 3 ). Technical support system, safety evaluation, detection, monitoring and technical standards.
