Team:SCAU-China/HP/Silver
Silver
Our human practice work involves several questions relating to biosafety, social justice and public acceptance. Our aSTARice is actually a genetically-modified organism, so our work focuses on people's concern about GMO (genetically modified organisms).
1. Self-improvement
First of all, we should make sure that we ourselves have correct understanding on this question. Because of this, we took part in some lectures about transgenic.
The first lecture was given by Jianping Kou, who is from the Department of Science, Technology and Education" in MOA(Minstry of Agriculture) of China, and Min Lin, who is the director of Institute of Biotechnology of CAAS(Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences). In this lecture, we got to know that transgenic food sold in market are absolutely safe because they were tested by many relavent departments and labs in valid as well as scientific ways for many years. And up to now, only a few kinds of transgenic products have been given permission into Chinese market. After lecture, we communicated with these scientists about new technologies uesd in transgenic researchs.
Apart from that, we 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" belonging to China National Center forFood Safety Risk Assessment (CFSA). In this talk, we obtained a lot of information in analysing GMO.
As we would like to create a new kind of crop, we thought 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 have no idea about how to carry out a biological project correctly, we held a talk on innovative and venture in our college. We gave a speech about our two projects and our ways to do biological research, such as how to get papers from some databases and how to communicate with professors. Our talk attracted more than 300 students and most of them were impressed by our fantastic ideas.
3. Open day of laboratory
As many freshmen in our college are eager to learn more about biological researchs in labs, we held this open day activity for freshmen in our lab. We led those freshmen students to visit our lab, introduced the function of different equipments and showed them our team video and posters. For many among them, it was first time to visit an advanced biological lab so that 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, for the reason that many of those young high school students might be impressed by this experience, and thus, because of our efforts, they might make their decision to work in science and engineering in the future.
4. Guideposts Making
Our university is quite large and contains several districts, so it is common 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 wanted to provide convenience for others. Meanwhile, we could also popularize scientific knowledge.
5. Biological graffiti painting
Many students of our university reside in dormitory area which is far away from the main campus. If we want to go to our lab or library, we have to cross a boring as well as dark culvert. In this year, College of Art of SCAU ( South China Agricultural University ) sponsored a beautification of this culvert. We participated in this activity and painted a part of this culvert. Our graffiti showed out a large plant cell and its ultra-structure.
6. Video making
For most college students, science is not always so 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 rice as a bioreactor to produce astaxanthin, and we also hope that aSTARice can serve as a kind of food in human's daily life, 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 potentially toxic and allergenic for human or livestock. Antibiotic genes might be transferred into gut microbes' genome of humans or animals, increasing the resistance of the microbes to the antibiotics, and which results in reducing the effectiveness of antibiotics in clinical treatment; the other one is that marker genes could be spread through pollens or in 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 now.
In order to reduce the side effects of antibiotic marker genes, we use a technique called selectable marker-free technique in the project, so the final aSTARice is a 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 caused by the transfer of the pollen, sufficiently guaranteeing the safety of the project. What's 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 chosen 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 assess the safety for rice.
Rice is the self-pollinated plant so that the genotype in the individuals is pure and homogeneous. The probabilities that cross-pollination takes place in two flowers are just 1%, and the distance of the effective spread of rice pollen is hardly beyond 1 meter.
The phenomenon of pollen escape is the main way which leads to the flow of exogenous gene of transgene plants. Recently, the researches 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 consulted plentiful papers, and then we found a conclusion that under the close distance less than 1% adjacent non-genetically modified plants would take place gene flow. If we increase the distance to 5~10 meters, the probabilities decrease to 0.001%~0.0001%, which means nearly no gene flow would happen in theory. When planting rice, we follow the safe regulations of transgene plants seriously, so we have a faith that it is impossible for gene flow comes up under this plant distance.
8. Laws & regulations
The credibility of the policy about "aSTARice" transgenic rice project:
8.1 The world health organization
In 2002, the world health organization claimed "20 questions about genetically modified food". So far, all of the genetically modified products in the international market have passed the risk assessment of 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 and the results 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 currently existing modified crops and food are all safe and the methods used to test its safety are 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, such as maize, soybean and rape seed, but no safety accident caused by eating them could be found.
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-resistant crops that in terms of impact on the environment and human health, gm is the same safe as non-gm, without any harm to health or 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 agricultural technology for American farmers, genetically modification has created huge environmental benefits and economic benefits.
The world health organization, the United Nations food and agriculture organization, the U.S. food and drug administration and other international organizations and authorities have said that 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, and has formed a set of law which is suitable for Chinese domestic situation and consistent with international convention of laws and regulations, technical regulations and management system. As a result, it has achieved remarkable results in 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.
