Integrated Human Practice

    
    In the past year, we have accomplished a lot of human practices to make the public better know about depression, synthetic biology and iGEM. It was the mental health lecture led by us and NJMU that helped university students deepen their understanding of autism and depression. After experts introduced basic knowledge of common mental disorders and methods of regulating emotions, the following heated discussion indicated the audience gained a lot. [lectures held by NJMU&WHU]

    
    Thereafter, in a class meeting for 2021 students and a welcome meeting for 2022 freshmen of College of Life Science in WHU, our members shared the glamour and attraction of Reach For Light and synthetic biology, which aroused their interest and curiosity in iGEM, and opened a new door toward biology for them. [freshmen in WHU]

    
    In the Elite Program, we elaborately prepared a series of biological courses for high school students. The three-day journey made them more enthusiastic and inspired their passion and imagination for future biology journeys. [freshmen in WHU]

    
    Online academy, a lecture accessible to people all over the country, in which our members brought synthetic biology and iGEM into the sight of more people. [online academy]

    In addition, we have operated our official WeChat account and released questionnaires on it constantly to take advantage of the influence of an open internet platform to deepen the public’s understanding of depression. [WeChat official account]

    
    Integrated human practice emphasizes what we gain from our human practices and how our project’s purpose, design or execution are impacted by those activities. During the whole year of practice, interaction with professors, enterprises and the organization of patients benefited us a lot.
    The communication with professor Fei Gan and Yi Yu activated us to consider:
    1)whether SAMe is absorbed by other gut microbes. Therefore, we came up with an idea to test hydrogel’s effect on product delivery and preventing the consumption of molecules. This verification is chosen as our ‘Hardware’.
    2)whether our targeted probiotic Bifidobacterium longum is suitable for being chassis. Knowing its genetic background is unclear, we decided to prove our design in Bacillus subtilis at first. And our experimental results showed that B. subtilis was a great choice as a Gram-positive model.
    3)whether our probiotic product can be a drug pump. It was professor Gan’s suggestion that due to the uniqueness of our intestinal drug periodically-delivery mode, our bacteria can be applied as an effective platform, that we had the prospect that our product will be used for the delivery of more medicines. [Interview]

    What we most valued was the meeting with DO & GO, an organization mainly composed of depression patients. Their feeling and opinions about existing depression treatments or drugs are precious guidance for our project improvement. To be more specific:
    1) They have mentioned that diverse kinds of medicines should be taken together, which was one of the main burdens during medicine-taking. In addition, they have also referred that SAMe was more likely to be seen as a supplement or placebo nowadays. Therefore, we decided to highlight our design as a healthcare product and focus on supplementary function for treatment.
    2) Their complaint about the bad taste of existing drugs pushed us to prepare our final product as milk tea powder, in order to enlarge acceptance among them and bring them more comfortable experiences of medicine-taking.
    3) Tired of long-term and repeated action of medicine-taking, they showed interest and expectation about medicine being released in the gut periodically for a long time. This increased our confidence to persist in emphasizing that our probiotic is characterized by periodic administration in future promotion. [interaction with DO&GO]

    
    Interactions with enterprises, Bluepha and MGI, inspired us strongly in terms of product promotion and business plan. After listening to their advice, we made an effort to figure out the scale and features of the probiotic market when compiling our business plan for ease of increasing our competitivity. [enterprise]