Diverse Views
During the whole process of our project, including topic research, literature review, idea generation, and product design, we always take extra attention to people from all related areas and reflect diverse demands and concerns in our project. By recognizing the demands from our target users that are citrus farmers, and gathering information from peer teams or experts, we accordingly modify and adjust the focus, designs, and details of the projects, which help us construct our project as a responsible and practical one.
Farmer Interview
The user and main stakeholder of our project is citrus farmers who are suffering from citrus greening disease. In our local communities, Jiangxi and Guangxi provinces were two of major citrus growing areas. In the early stage of our project when we are planning the blueprint, we conducted interviews with Mr. Zhang in Guangxi and Mr. Huang in Jiangxi.
The overall disease situations and current prevention & treatment methods were consulted. Through the discussion with Mr. Huang, we were informed that labour intensive and eco-unfriendly chemical drugs were applied to every leafs and trunks, which stimulates their demand for a long term or simple resolution. Considering this demand, we proposed the engineered phage as our vector for downstream effect substances because phage can reproduce and self-spread to the environmental pathogens. The D. citri was also chosen as the target since it could block the spreading of the disease. In addition, economic concerns were also frequently mentioned in our discussions. According to the estimation of Mr. Huang, his citrus farm would waste around 100 thousands RMB per year for citrus greening prevention, the cost of which would be higher if any trees were infected. In response to this concern, we also took additional attentions to our product costs in later designs.
Phage Expert Interview
Due to the limitation of our knowledge in phage engineering, we turned to experts of this field for professional suggestions. Dr. Xia, one of the main researchers in Shanghai Innovation Institute, is working on DNA folding techniques that intensively reply on phage engineering. With discussions with her, we gathered more information on norms and costumes in the field of phage. Most importantly, she emphasized the importance of the engineering sites in the phage genome. In response to that, we deeply reviewed and analyzed the genome and corresponding annotations of CLasMV1, which leads to the final decision of operating on capsid protein that is essential to the phage life activities.
Peer Reviews in Conference of China iGEMer Community
As a united community, iGEMers all around the world provide a good resource for inter-peer discussions and reviews. We also actively participated in every activities and opportunities to interact with other iGEMers to share our projects and experiences, as well as receiving timely and useful feedbacks. During July 7th - 10th, we participated in the Conference of China iGEMer Community (CCiC), reported our project, and discussed with other teams. Through three days' intensive report, listen, and discussion, we built up networks with other amazing teams, as well as receiving lots of practical feedbacks, which promoting our project in a technical way.
