What is the meaning of our project? What is the public perception of our project? From the beginning of the IGEM preparation, we tried to find out the answer. In order to let more people know about our project and explore the significance of our project, we conducted human practice, mainly questionnaire survey and expert interview, to seek the significance that our project can bring to the society, and to explore how the society will affect our project.

🕷The Project Inspiration

Our project is inspired by the model animal of our college, silkworm, which can change the amount or toughness of silk, color and so on by editing genes or other ways. So we think that spiders which are also spinning animals use their webs for hunting and other activities. In addition, spider silk is very thin, which is a tenth of the hair, but its toughness is better than the same thickne .ss of steel wire. As a result, improving the toughness of spider silk has a very broad research prospect.

🔍The Background Research

With the purpose of our investigation, we looked up relevant literature and found that some scholars had searched for genes related to improving the toughness of spider silk through experiments and bioinformatics analysis. Consequently, we summarized the viewpoints of various scholars and found two genes, fused the spider silk of non-Araneoidea with the proteins of these two genes, and conducted wire drawing experiments. To see if resilience is enhanced.

🧢The Expert Interviews

We asked the instructor of this project, Mr. Wang Yi, who has been engaged in related research recently. Our project received great support from him. He told us that our project was feasible and gave us a lot of guidance on the experiment.

🎧The Experimental design

The technical route design of the project is as follows: the codon is optimized for whole gene synthesis, then the transformed strain is constructed, the expressed protein is purified, and the spider silk is extracted, dissolved and dialyzed, the expressed protein is added to make a mixture, and the "mixed silk" is obtained by in vitro spinning technology to determine whether its performance is improved by adding the expressed protein. In the experiment, a non-aranidae spider was selected, which was easy to obtain, easy to feed and easy to operate. The spider silk was extracted from its tail, dissolved and broken by lithium bromide, and then removed by PBS replacement protein solution for the purpose of dialysis purification. Finally, new gene expression proteins were added for mixed incubation. In the process of the experiment, repeated exploration was carried out to find the best experimental conditions. The optimized scheme was as follows: the protein concentration of the spinning stock (250-350 mg/mL), the capillary diameter used to collect spider silk (30-70 µm), the buffer concentration (250-1000 mM, pH 5), and the buffer was monovalent acetate; More and better experimental conditions need to be further explored and tried. Finally, the properties of the experimental silk will be measured by polarizing light microscope, scanning electron microscope, tensile testing machine and other tools to determine the function of the new gene expression protein.

💻The questionnaire survey

The instructor and the partners in the project agreed that our project was meaningful and feasible. In order to obtain more support and recognition, the public’s understanding of spider silk and suggestions. We designed questionnaires to understand public opinion and attitudes towards our project. The results show that 50.68% of people believe that spider silk could be used as raw material to produce products with greater toughness. And 77% of people are acceptable to use spider silk as raw material products.

Ⅰ. Question: What was your initial impression of spider silk?

Ⅱ. Question: Do you think that using spider silk as raw material can produce products with greater toughness?

Ⅲ. Question: When you think of silk, what creature comes to mind?

Ⅳ. Question: Can you accept products made from spider silk?

Ⅴ. Question: What do you think can be applied to the modification of spider silk?

Ⅵ. Question: Whether you have expectations for spider silk and are willing to buy related products?

📕Integrated Human Practice

👉Our project is inspired by the model organism of our college, the silkworm, and then associated with the spider, the human practice gives us confidence that our project is meaningful and feasible.

👉Many scientists are doing research on improving the toughness of spider silk, and we looked at the relevant literature and found two genes related to spider toughness.

👉After the interview with Teacher Wang Yi, our project was affirmed and supported. At the same time, he put forward some suggestions for our experimental design.

👉Finally, we conducted a questionnaire survey, and found that more than half of the people have expectations for our project, and its products can be applied to many fields, which has far-reaching significance. But in terms of buying, we may need to think further.