Team:OUC-China/Project Policy Practise

Overview

As an iGEM team, we indeed gain an insight into synthetic biology, but for most ordinary people, any new way to break the laws of nature can’t be accepted easily.

Except for the design and experiments of project, we also have responsibility for promoting synthetic biology around people and solving the problems about biology safety

Start from the every drop, use our ability to affect the new generation, let them know the synthetic biology and related fields, view the problem with scientific vision. take this as a starting point, we hold the science summer camp in college, pass knowledge around Qingdao high school students, leading the students to swim in the sea of synthetic biology.

Exchanging ideas and communication are essential. We keep in touch with Peking University and Beijing Normal University, and we give a hand to Peking University. In order to make further improvement on the quality, we visit Qingdao Institute of Biomass Energy and Bioprocess Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences and The Affiliated Hospital of Qingdao University, taking a series of exchanging activities.

To link theory with practice, solve the applications of biology completely, we turn our attention to fish, and a specific survey scheme is made to perfect our project.

communication

In the future, we hope to apply this system for social practice . we took the practice investigation to find whether the system is useable in actual production.We plan to use our peoject to promote and improve the design for serving in human society better.

Nowadays recirculating aquaculture is developing to higher density and intensification. The outbreak of fish disease will perform huge losses. It’s the best way that if we can take precautions against fish disease to reduce losses. We visit the fish farms to find how to cure ill fishes and prevent the fish from disease.

ABOUT THE CURE:

1. They put the ill fish into another fishpond in quarantine.

2. put CuSO4 or some medicine into the fishpond to kill the pathogens.

3. Feed the fish with the food which include antibiotic.

ABOUT THE PRECAUTION：

1. Using smart system to control the temperature of the water.

2. Periodically filter the water and disinfect water.

3. Dealing the fish with potassium permanganate before they put the fry into the fishpond.

At present, Chinese aquaculture industry losses seriously because of disease and most of the solutions (such as delivering chemicals and antibiotics) are polluting the environment and have little effect. So we hope that we can apply our project on oral DNA vaccine of fishes in the future. But many researchers who study with DNA vaccine do not actually understand the needs of farms or markets. Actually, the feed is the key, as it is the simplest and most direct oral vaccine carrier, and it also is the most essential element of aquaculture industry. Now the question is whether we can use the pellets as a carrier for oral DNA vaccine？In order to solve this question, we visited Hu Haibin who is the most authoritative expert in aquaculture feeds in OUC-China, in the hope that they can find a reasonable feeding way for us.

In conversation, we learned that fish’s feed selection is diverse, such as some fish like floating feed, while others prefer the micro particles. But these feeds is not having DNA or living microorganisms. However, there are still some feed containing micro-organisms or micro-organisms own products, but these biological materials are inactivated. In present, the yeast is the most commonly utilized, its main role is to improve palatability and to ameliorate the intestinal environment. Thus, experts recommend us using yeast for chassis because it is easy to feeding. But either E. coli or yeast, there will be leaks if feed them to farm, and there will be bio-security threat. There are some fodder was wrapped with the outer membrane which only can be digest in the intestine, such as sodium alginate, which was supposed to prevent contamination of food residues in aquaculture water, if it be applied on our project, we can effectively solve the microbial leakage problems. But it also has drawbacks, the high production process requires and cost. Because of these, the application is not widely. Could our idea be blocked up with the high coast?

This lab is manufacturing chlorella. It's a nutrient-rich feed for some fish larvae.

In the ornamental fish industry, people don’t care the composition of the feed. We OUC-China came to the ornamental fish market and interview shopkeepers. We found that the price of aquarium fishes (both freshwater fish and seawater fish) is much more expensive than edible fishes, and they suffer from the same disease of the edible fishes. For ornamental fish, they have the higher death rate when they get ill, which is close to 90%. Fish amateurs are willing to bear relatively high expenses to protect their pets from being ill. We found there weren’t any feed with DNA vaccines or other drugs, but the coated pellets which aims to prevent water from being polluted by the feed sells well. Therefore if we combined coated pellets technology with our projects and apply the feed with outer membrane on the ornamental fish industry. It must represent a wide-open market.

Those are normal pellets on the market now.

We think that our originally problem has been solved. It will be manufactured if we use yeast as our chassis. At the same time, using coated particles to achieve oral will reduce the risk of safety. If we apply our technology to ornamental fish industry, it won't have problems to develop. One day, this technology will be mature. At that moment, there is no problem being used in aquaculture.

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