Team:Uppsala/Human Practices
Human Practices
This year Uppsala iGEM had our focus on making sure that our microfluidic methods were as accessible as possible. With this in mind we cooperated with the newly started company Makerspace, that provides necessities for biohackers, with the purpose of improving their lab work possibilities. We therefore wrote a manufacturing manual according to our microfluidic method, which we sent together with CAD designs of chips. While we asked biohackers for feedback on the manual in order to make it as comprehensible as possible, our ultimate wish was to provide public users, such as biohackers, the possibility to themselves develop the knowledge of how to perform lab procedures as well as more scientific understanding. The principle behind microfluidics also makes our chip a more economical alternative of performing certain procedures, which also would greatly assist low budget labs. One of the things we did was therefore to approximate the cost of our prototype heat shock chip in order to get an understanding of how much they could save. What we saw was that using the chip instead of the standard method of transformation potentially differed quite a lot, even for a simple procedure such as heat shock transformation. This is just a short description of what we did in order to improve the accessibility of our microfluidics and to provide information to potential users. For more information, continued reading is available as explained below.
The Profit of Transformation page is connected to the human practice silver criteria and it contains all the information concerning the price calculations performed on the chip prototype data. This is used to approximate how much could potentially be saved by using our microfluidics method.
The Improving the Manual page is connected to the human practice gold criteria and contains the information concerning the manual we wrote to make the manufacturing method easy to understand, as well as how we improved this manual based on the feedback provided by Makerspace.
The Integrated Practices page contains a short description on how we integrated the Makerspace feedback into our project.
The Engagement page contains information concerning our reasoning behind reaching out to Makerspace and other presentations that we have held in order to reach out to the public.
