Human Practices

Along the brainstorming sessions different ideas came up, all different from another. Two of them were related to local problems and two were related to detection.

In the end, our final project is: detect Vibrio aestuarianus which is a harmful bacteria for adult oysters using SHERLOCK (1) detection technique.

By discussing with oyster farmers and by doing bibliography, we realized that oyster farmers do not have any user-friendly technique to detect oyster pathogens. In fact, to have an idea about the water quality around their cultures they need to rely on specialized companies. The tests that are performed need laboratory equipment and intervention of scientists. Using companies is expensive and time consuming. Moreover, oyster farmers do not have any explanation about the pathogens that are found in the Thau lagoon. This is the reason why we decided to focus on the development of a paper-based test, which is accessible to oyster farmers and doable without any laboratory equipment and knowledge. We performed several paper-based tests to develop our proof of concept. For the moment, the test works with synthetic sequences meaning that laboratory equipment and knowledge are necessary to perform the test. Our plan is to anticipate all the difficulties that oyster farmers might encounter when realizing the test (see implementation) and overcome them to have the most user-friendly test as possible.

To meet the demand as well as possible, we met Yannick Desplats, oyster farmer in Bouzigues and we conducted a survey to have different opinions about the problems of oyster contaminations, current solutions for detection, and how likely farmers would be to use our test.

The video 1 is extracted from our interview with Yannick Desplats. All along the day we spent with him, he explained to us what the oyster farming profession is, what are the problems they meet every day, what they think about the actual solutions to detect oyster pathogens, and what they think about the communication between scientists and oyster farmers.

These answers confirmed our choice of developing a detection technique as all the farmers questioned were victims of infection episodes. Moreover a majority of these infections happen every year. We then wanted to understand if the farmers knew the pathogen responsible for these infections. Furthermore we wanted to see if the infection had an economic impact on their production as reported in the literature:

With these results we saw the importance of having an accessible test for the farmers as 38% of them did not know the cause of the infections and yet 75% of them had an economical impact on the production.

Following, we wanted to know if detecting V.aestuarianus was relevant for them and if performing the test was something interesting for them.

These results comforted our idea to detect the bacteria V.aestuarianus as 100% of the people surveyed answered positively. Moreover, the idea of having an accessible test was something 88% of the farmers wanted.