Part 1 – Inspiration

     In seeking to realize human's long-lasting dream of the migration to terrestrial planets, our team, CPU_Nanjing, would like to contribute from the perspective of synthetic biology. When thinking of the feasibility of such imagination, we shall pay attention to the necessary elements for the reproduction of life, such as carbon, nitrogen, oxygen and phosphorus.

     Given the differences in the biogeochemical cycle properties of these fundamental elements, phosphorus was way less concerned in terms of interstellar migration. However, as the 11th most common element on earth, phosphorus has been commonly recognized as a limiting nutrient affecting biological productivity for most ecosystems, which makes it vital to fully comprehend the value of phosphorus before diving into the lab.

     Here are some questions to consider:

In what part of life does phosphorus play a role?
How does it affect our life and how influential is it?
How much phosphorus is there on terrestrial planets?
In what form does it exist there?

For more details, please turn to Integrated Human Practice.

Part 2 – A deeper exploration of our mission

     Apart from the confirmation of the significance of our topic, we took a step further to reinforce connections with the world.

     The aim of Human Practice is to connect synthetic biology projects to the society and create effective interactions between them. As innovators and researchers in life science, we stick to the point that synthetic biology can change the world. As a result, it's necessary to go out of the lab, convey our ideas to the public and gain useful feedback to improve our project. Based on this belief, we concluded that another core mission of Human Practice is to deeply explore the entire society's understanding, acceptance and expectations of interstellar migration.

     Jumping out of the limitations of the laboratory and examining our work from a broader perspective can help put forward higher requirements for our experiment work.

     For more details, please turn to Integrated Human Practice , Education & Communication and Partnership.

Part 3 - Retrospect and timeline

Throughout the whole process, we have always been devoted to promoting our project to different communities and gained feedback and suggestions from experts from various fields. So here we also considered about the Human Practices Cycle to achieve the closed loop of expression, feedback, engineering progress and building connections. .

The whole process of our Human Practice is showed in the timeline below.

Human Practice Timeline

Build a team

Deconstruction of iGEM project

Brainstorm

Organized several brainstorm sessions in Biophysical Innovation Lab, Faculty of Science of China Pharmaceutical University
Focus our attention on phosphorus on terrestrial planets

Early investigation

Literature mining: phosphorus on terrestrial planets
Interview with Dr. Xingxia Chen
Conduct questionnaire surveys

Route determination

Interview with Dr. Weimin Zhang
Interview with Dr. Jierong Jiang
Decide to manufacture phosphate based on feedback from HP

Experiment design

Interview with Dr. Xin Wang
Brainstorm: possible challenges while operating on terrestrial planet
Collaboration with ShanghaiTech_China

Inspiration to improve

Interview with Dr. Xiaomeng Wang
Worked together with NJTech_China

Project landing & Close-loop

Interview with manager Zheng
Prototype Hardware: design and test
Close the loop between initial expectations and final results