Human Practices

At the beginning of our project, we actually conceived a lot of ideas, and through human practice, we listened to all sides and finally came up with a complete concept for this project. Below, we report on how outside opinions have shaped our project from four perspectives: social, commercial, scientific, and ethical. The opinions from the social and business sectors mainly shaped the need for this project: our product is truly valuable and needed. The scientific field's advice addresses the project's feasibility: having a realistic experimental protocol to build the genetic circuit. Finally, we need to look at the project on an ethical level to ensure that it is acceptable to the public. Putting all this information together, we can give the design of this project and eventually give feedback. The schema diagram is shown below:

Society

In this section, we focus on the public's current level of knowledge, taste and efficacy preferences, and acceptance of meal replacement products. Based on this information, we outline what improvements we need to make, such as whether we need to enrich the effectiveness of meal replacement products beyond fat loss, or whether we need to introduce several new flavors. The philosophy of our project is: "Everyone has the right to become better." This principle requires us to take into account the needs of as many people as possible. Even if this goal is difficult to perfectly achieve, we still need to have a try, because that's the value of our project!

To take into account the breadth and depth of views, we take a combination of point and surface for the survey of the masses. First, we collect data through questionnaires and analyze the data to get some preliminary ideas for improvement. Then we conduct a random interview on the street to do in-depth communication and discussion on some issues about the meal replacement products and make some possible corrections to the results of the questionnaire.

Questionnaire for the general public

To make our project more practical and commercialized, we realized that we need to hear more voices from the community. Therefore, we created a questionnaire to collect more valuable opinions by distributing it.

Questionnaire design details: Through the questionnaire, we mainly want to know the following five aspects:

1. basic information about the questionnaire fillers, including gender, age, occupation, etc.

2. knowledge of the questionnaire fillers about meal replacement products.

3. preference of the questionnaire fillers in terms of efficacy, taste, and category of meal replacement products.

4. acceptance of home meal replacement product manufacturing machines.

5. acceptance of genetically modified foods. Acceptance of genetically modified foods.

Based on the above objectives, we created and launched the "Enterbeauty Market Research Questionnaire".

By July 28, 2022, 1029 responses were collected. We conducted the reliability analysis, and the Cronbach.𝛼 coefficient was 0.814, and this number rises to 0.937 after removing some responses with obvious problems, which stands that our market profile of meal replacement products is valid and trustable.

The following is our analysis of the results of the questionnaire for specific questions:

The questionnaire was completed by a larger proportion of women, accounting for 68.04%. This result is consistent with the current meal replacement market, mainly female consumers.

In addition, most of the subjects did not know much about the meal replacement market and meal replacement products (about 80%), which indicates that the meal replacement industry is still a relatively new field so far, and it is necessary to popularize the concept of meal replacement to the society. Food safety and health are considered to be the most important requirements for meal replacement products, while the appearance of the food (e.g., whether the food is attractive and appetizing) is the least important consideration. The results tell us that the main focus should be on food safety for a limited period and that only after this requirement is achieved can the taste and appearance of meal replacement foods be discussed and studied.

Next, we need to understand society's hopes for the possible functions of meal replacement products to target the construction of engineered bacteria. The majority of subjects wanted meal replacement products to have a fat loss and shaping effects (out of 5, mean 3.76), while also focusing on energy replenishment (3.72) and disease prevention (3.4) functions.

In addition to this, the taste of meal replacements is also a very important aspect, for which we counted the popularity of several flavors that are currently planned to be realized. In addition, we also collected suggestions from the subjects regarding the taste and tried to achieve as many flavors as possible with due consideration of feasibility.

In addition, for our hardware part, we wanted to design a home meal replacement product manufacturing machine and needed to research the acceptance of this solution in advance. From the results, the popularity of the home meal replacement manufacturing machine did not meet our expectations. Less than half of the people tend to use this product. Therefore, the best-integrated sales solution at this stage would be a mix of machine and ready-made meal replacement products.

Finally, we were also interested in the attitude of consumers toward GM foods. From the results, the majority of subjects were able to accept GM foods that have been approved by the relevant government departments. The acceptance of GM food is increasing as the safety of GM food is gradually being assured.

Street interviews

By distributing the questionnaire, we got answers to some basic questions related to meal replacement products. But in addition, we also wanted to get some deeper, more detailed, and more specific opinions. For example, from the questionnaire, we only knew that the acceptance of the home meal replacement product machine was not high enough, but we did not know the reasons why the subjects rejected the machine. If we could get some useful opinions, it might help us to improve the machine and make it more popular. Therefore, we conducted a street interview with randomly selected passersby of different age groups on the following questions:

1. Basic interviewer information: age, occupation, etc.

2. The interviewer's knowledge of meal replacement products, and what are the shortcomings of existing meal replacement products

3. What are the suggestions for our home meal replacement products manufacturing machine

4. Can you accept meal replacement products produced through genetic modification technology?

We recorded the interviewees' responses, and some samples are given below.

I have bought and eaten meal replacement products before, and the main purpose is to lose weight. But this didn't last long before I give up because those meal replacement powders and meal replacement bars are just too bad-tasting. Most of the products' taste is pretty single, so long-term eating this food would be boring. But the price of these products is very high. So it is better to buy ingredients, to make yourself a fresher and healthier fat-loss meal. I hope relative manufacturers can try to provide products with similar tastes to the three daily meals.

-- Mr. Xu, 20 years old, junior college student

Would it be more time-consuming or troublesome to make meal replacement products by myself with a machine? I'm very busy at work every day, so I usually order take-out at the office at noon because it's too late to cook every morning. If such a manufacturing machine allows me to just press a few buttons and then can get a healthy meal replacement shake, then I think it's pretty good and useful. Even if the price of the machine is relatively higher, I would consider buying it because compared to eating take-out every day at noon, such a diet will be healthier.

--Ms. Li, 28 years old, a company employee

There are often reports on TV telling us that GM food is not safe, I think. I never know why GM food is so expensive, I always choose to buy common and fresh vegetables when I go to the supermarket. However, my son would say that GM food is better and more nutritious, but I'm still not sure.

--Mr. Liu, 63 years old, a retired worker

In the previous section, we learned about the public's needs and suggestions for meal replacement products. The next thing we need to focus on is the development of the related industry and analyze the meal replacement food market, which is significant for our final business plan (detailed in the Entrepreneurship part). Our market research was divided into two phases: collecting information and compiling market reports; contacting meal replacement industry companies and organizing visits and discussions.

Market research.

1. Development trend of meal replacement market size:

The data chart below shows us the basic situation of the current meal replacement market in China. It reported that the market size is growing rapidly, increasing almost exponentially every year until 2020. After 2020 the growth rate slows down because of COVID-19 and other reasons but still maintains the growth trend. The increase in user demand is driving the industry's market size to continue to expand. As the variety of meal replacement food continues to enrich, the market's consumer power has been fully released. Although China's market size compared with developed countries still has a certain gap, its potential market size is huge and the meal replacement industry still has a large upside in the future.

2. Analysis of the main brands of the meal replacement market

According to statistics, several major brands in the current Chinese meal replacement products market include ffit8, WonderLab, Chaojilin, Wanbaobao and YOUHEALING. Their brand valuations as well as overall scores are recorded in the two tables below.

The rise of these new brands is mainly due to the current stage of development in China: the economic recovery, the increase of consumers' purchasing power, the diversified personality needs of Generation Z and the hardcore merits of quality and brand awareness, supply chain and marketing strength behind the brands. Consumers' desire for a better life, the new media dividend, the iteration of the consumer population, and the innovation of the supply chain infrastructure have all given new consumer brands room for innovation and opportunities to rise.

After having a preliminary understanding of several major domestic brands, we try to discover the aspects that are not yet covered by the mainstream brands in the market, and then design our product positioning, and also have more confidence to achieve product marketing and promotion

Common Categories of Meal Replacement

The common meal replacement products on the market can be divided by function: fat loss and plasticity, muscle building, energy supplementation, etc. The products can also be divided by form: solid, liquid, etc. The detailed classification is displayed in the chart below. We have evaluated and discussed the various types of products, hoping to select the category of products that can facilitate our production, and also ensure a certain degree of taste for the consumer (see integrated human practice section for details)

Company Visit

After gathering enough information about the meal replacement market, our team members wanted to go deeper into the current production process of meal replacement products. We hope to find some inspiration to design our production solution. We were fortunate enough to contact a Beijing-based food processing company (Beijing Youde Culture Co., Ltd.), whose business scope mainly includes snack food production, and in recent years has also been involved in the production of some meal replacements.

We contacted the company via the internet. They answered our questions and agreed to our request for a visit. However, for commercial reasons, they could only open a small part of the production area to us and required that the photos we took could not reveal important information.

We organized a factory tour for our team members on Saturday, April 16, 2022.

Firstly, our team members needed to put on the production plant overalls and be disinfected them before entering the plant for the tour.

The picture below shows the disinfection room for related production utensils, all utensils must be disinfected before use to ensure hygiene.

Next, our team members visited some of the storage rooms where raw materials are stored. All kinds of ingredients are stored in their special storage rooms and the environment is spacious and clean.

After we left the factory, we had in-depth communication with each other regarding the questions we got from the preliminary research. All these gains helped us to develop our production plan (see the section on integrated human practice).

Science

Prof. Wang Jiangyun

Our project, from concept confirmation, to project design, to project development, to project closing, has been inseparable from the help of some professors and teachers. During the project, we kept communicating with the project PI, listening to the suggestions from teachers and experts, and actively seeking help from the institute and lab.

Mr. Wang Jiangyun is our PI for this year's iGEM project, and he has helped us in all aspects. We got rich experience from some seniors in his group who participated in iGEM in previous years. The determination of our project was made after many exchanges with the teacher's group. Our experiments received especially a lot of help from Mr. Wang Jiangyun: our experimental protocols were constantly polished by him, he helped us when we needed large experimental apparatus, and we could receive guidance in his lab when we needed training on experimental techniques. We often attend the meetings of our teacher's project group to learn from our experience and gain inspiration.

Dr. Lin Hongyuan

Doctor Lin Hongyuan is a professor at the First Affiliated Hospital of the PLA General Hospital and has extensive clinical experience. In a conference, Mr. Lin introduced us to the mechanism of occurrence and treatment of enterogenic sepsis. His insightful understanding of intestinal disease itself and intestinal flora inspired us to pay attention to the future meal replacement design for intestinal care. In addition, his insights and questions about our project from a doctor's perspective made us more relevant and cautious when designing the project.

Prof. Xu Pingyong

For the specific part of the experiment, we consulted with Mr. Ping-Yong Xu. Mr. Ping-Yong Xu is the research group leader of the Key Laboratory of Nucleic Acid Biology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Institute of Biophysics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, and a teacher of molecular biology at the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences. We received tremendous help from our teacher for the selection of receptor cells, the selection of plasmid vector, the design of gene circuit, and the problems of experimental operation.

Prof. Jin Zhong

The experimental group of the suicide switch team received important support from Ms. Jin Zhong. The oxygen-controlled suicide switch we designed required anaerobic experiments, and the university laboratory did not have the relevant experimental instruments and conditions, so we turned to Ms. Jin Zhong's group for help. Ms. Zhong Jin is a doctoral supervisor at the Institute of Microbiology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, focusing on molecular genetics of lactic acid bacteria and molecular genetic engineering of lactic acid bacteria. Fortunately, Ms. Zhong Jin not only agreed to borrow the relevant instruments in the laboratory, but also provided training on anaerobic experimental techniques.

We could not have carried out our project without the help of our foreign aid experts, and we would like to express our solemn gratitude!

Ethics

Since we want to produce meal replacement shakes through GM technology. Therefore, if we look at the project from a bioethical point of view, we should first ensure that GM technology is acceptable to the majority of people. We would like to hear a variety of perspectives on this issue to help us rationalize the use of GM technology in the implementation of our project.

To this end, we have organized a debate on the topic of bioethics. In addition to GM technology and GM food, the topics discussed included the resurrection of extinct species, cloning technology, and other hot issues closely related to synthetic biology. By organizing such a debate, we can both promote and educate the public about synthetic biology, and help us extract useful information from the arguments of both sides to guide our project.

Our competition was held on May 28th. Here is the poster we made for this event.

The debate tournament is a strait tournament system (a kind of Chinese debate system). We had a heated debate on the previously mentioned issues.

We recorded the contestants' views on GM technology and GM food.

GM technology can increase yields and make food more nutritious and diverse. -- Wang, 20 years old

GM technology can lead to the accumulation of toxicity, which may disrupt the ecological balance and is a potential threat to the environment.

-- Xie, 19 years old

After some discussion, the debaters reached a consensus: GM technology is one of the cutting-edge technologies and its rational use can create a lot of value. However, considering that it is still a technology with risks, it must be regulated strictly.

In addition, we are pleased that most people can accept GM food. This made us feel more comfortable carrying out our projects

Integrated Human Practices

After extensive research from four perspectives: social, business, scientific, and ethical, we have come up with a complete proposal for this project. This section highlights how this information has influenced and shaped our project. We have divided these into experimental design, software and hardware development, and education.

Experimental Design

1. Designed genetic circuit

According to our market research, one of the gaps in the current meal replacement market is the homogenization of products, with little difference between brands and a lack of innovation. Therefore, in the planning stage of the project, we considered taste diversity and efficacy diversity as the two innovative points of our product. For this purpose, we designed genetic circuits that can achieve different flavors and effects. By controlling the external conditions for the growth and fermentation of the engineered bacteria (such as light, etc.), we can control gene expression and selectively produce functional factors and flavor substances. At this stage, there are three functional factors and three flavor substances, and users can choose to express one functional factor and one flavor substance according to their preferences. By this design, we enrich the taste and efficacy. We give a satisfactory design answer to our market research. click here for detailed project description

2. Built an environment for the experiment

In our scientific communication section, an expert suggested that we were supposed to restore the real production environment in the laboratory. The basic experimental equipment is enough to meet the basic culture demand, but not to detect and control the temperature, humidity, oxygen concentration, and light conditions of bacterial fermentation. Therefore, our hardware group plans to build a controlled and airtight device to ensure that the environmental parameters of bacterial fermentation can be controlled during the experiment. click here for detailed hardware information

3. added suicide switch

The results of our survey on ethical issues related to the project showed that some respondents were concerned about the serious environmental impact of similar transgenic technologies. For this reason, we have added an oxygen-controlled suicide switch to the genetic circuit of the engineered bacteria, designed to ensure that the engineered bacteria used to produce the meal replacement products will die quickly at atmospheric oxygen concentrations but will reproduce normally in an anaerobic environment. We ensure an oxygen-free environment in the meal replacement production machine to facilitate the reproduction of the engineered bacteria. If the bacteria leak, they will die quickly at atmospheric oxygen concentration, avoiding the threat to the environment. click here to learn about our design of the suicide switch

Software and Hardware Development

In our initial questionnaire, the majority of people still preferred the traditional model of selling meal replacement products, i.e. buying pre-made products and consuming them directly when needed. They were not very interested in our proposed home meal replacement product maker. In the follow-up random street interviews, we conducted a more detailed and in-depth survey to address this issue. The main reason is that people who choose meal replacement products to replace their daily diet are usually people who are busy at work and lack the free time to cook healthy meals for themselves but still want to eat regularly and stay in shape. They generally believe that using a manufacturing machine to make meal replacement products is time-consuming.

To solve this problem, in addition to achieving the basic functions of adjustable taste and efficacy, our manufacturing machine should also try to ensure ease of use and be as time-saving as possible. We designed an additional app that connects to the machine, records production in real-time, and gives alerts when ingredients need to be added or when the production is complete (for details, refer to the software section). With the aid of the software, consumers only need to add ingredients at regular intervals, and the rest of the time can be freely arranged to wait for the meal replacement shake to be made. This improvement makes the manufacturing machine more convenient to use and saves consumers' time.

In addition, our visit to the factory gave a lot of inspiration for the hardware build. For example, the factory has strict requirements for the sterilization of raw materials and utensils. Inspired by this, we added a sterilization device to our machine. Another example is that there is ambient temperature and humidity testing data everywhere in the factory. Accordingly, our manufacturing machine also uses various sensors to strictly record the temperature, oxygen level, and other parameters during fermentation. Our team members thought that it was very instructive to get a deeper understanding of the actual production work.

Promotion and Education

Adequate research made us interested in a market full of potential meal replacement products. We hope to set up a company based on our project and put the product on the market.

We were guided by the development of several major companies in the Chinese meal replacement market. We planned to found ChangBao Technologies, LLC. Following the trajectory of these companies, we also made a business plan, and the model diagram below shows the financing process we envisioned. see our Entrepreneurship page for more details

In addition, we needed to promote our product based on the company we founded. We actively participated in the following Competitions, presenting our “company” and promoting our brand.

In the following debate we organized, we realized that university students are very interested in biology and they are also one of the target groups for our meal replacement products. So, we thought we could combine our product's promotion with the science education task. We organized educational activities such as a biology knowledge contest, a bioethics debate, and an essay on the theme of love and life (see the Education section for details). At these events, in addition to good educational content, we would also add the concept of meal replacement and provide an introduction to what we are doing. This does not conflict with our goals for Education. The students reflected that our project brought the knowledge from books to practice and made them realize that biological knowledge and biotechnology can contribute much to society, making them more passionate about biology.