. Human Practices .

Always maintain a dialogue with the demand side: understand their needs, and improve our project design based on their suggestions.

Mrs. Wu

Mrs. Wu is a tea farmer in Wuyishan Tea Garden. She has carefully cultivated tea trees for decades and has rich experience in tea tree breeding, planting, and cultivation.

Wuyishan City

In the interview process, Mrs. Wu told us that the sudden drought often hit her tea garden in recent years.

Wuyishan City is located in the south of China, the climate of which is usually humid and rainy. However, climate changes like sudden intensifying droughts always catch farmers off guard, which can cause serious economic losses. Unfortunately, tea farmers have not yet found effective methods to protect the tea trees from the damage of drought. Most of them alleviate drought through artificial irrigation using water pipes, buckets, and pumps. Everything related to drought sold out as soon as it was put on the shelves.

This visit to the tea garden has aroused our attention to the problem of drought. We hope to help tea farmers not only prevent and inhibit drought effectively through scientific and technological means but also reduce the economic losses caused by drought.

Mr. Luo

Mr. Luo is a farmer engaged in navel orange production in Xinfeng, Jiangxi, and has accumulated rich planting experience in decades of navel orange cultivation.

Xinfeng, Jiangxi

Compared with ordinary farmers, his orchard is closer to the water source, bringing it a location advantage that can be irrigated by water faster when drought comes.

However, the navel oranges in the orchard are still under the threat of drought. In the interview with Mr. Luo, we learned that with the development of science and technology, Mr. Luo's orchard has been equipped with a sprinkler irrigation system that integrates irrigation technology with fertilizer. But even so, many fruit trees in orchards are still at risk of dying and reducing production due to drought.

However, the water-fertilizer integration technology adopted by Mr. Luo gives us great inspiration, perhaps we can not only save manpower but also improve the water retention effect by combining the soluble water-retaining substance with the irrigation system.

The communication with Mr. Luo made us once again deeply feel the impact of drought on the lives of farmers, and also brought new inspiration for our project design.

Maintain communication with experts so that our project design can be carried out within the scope of feasibility.

Mr. Li

Li Chunsheng is a citrus planting expert in Xinfeng County, Jiangxi Province. He specializes in citrus cultivation technology with abundant experience and often provides guidance for farmers who plant navel oranges and citrus.

Mr. Li told us that "every family has an orchard, everyone grows navel orange now in Liuxing Village". When we asked about the impact of natural disasters on fruit tree planting in recent years, he replied that the drought and freezing damage are still the "main culprits" affecting fruit trees.

As early as 2003, his orchard was damaged by freezing for a long time, causing the death of many fruit trees. At present, traditional antifreeze methods still can not protect the damage from freeze, which causes irreversible damage to the roots and branches of fruit trees. Mr. Li expressed his appreciation and expectation for our project.

After the communication with Mr. Li Chunsheng, we learned that drought and freezing damage have become major opponents of agriculture at present, which gradually influence our country and even global food security.

Concerned about drought and freezing inspired the project, we decided to develop a strategy based on synthetic biology to help farmers cope with drought and freeze.

Mr.Lyu

Mr. Lyu Jianwei is an assistant professor at the School of Life Sciences at Xiamen University. He focuses his research on biotechnology law and ethics, biotechnology governance, biotechnology intellectual property rights, etc.

Based on the systematic study of law in the undergraduate and doctoral stages, Mr. Lyu will conduct further research and study at the Institute of Zoology, Chinese Academy of Sciences from 2020 to 2022. This year, Lyu is working at the School of Life Sciences at Xiamen University and has published several articles on biosafety and ethics. In this discussion, we introduced the design of the kill switch to Mr. Lyu Jianwei. After understanding the basic situation of our project, Mr. Lyu praised our design to prevent horizontal gene transfer, emphasizing that we should pay great attention to the leakage of engineered bacteria in the laboratory or the soil. Then Mr. Lyu introduced us to the international laws and regulations on genetic engineering and gene editing in recent years.

From this discussion, we learned that there is still a big gap between international and domestic legislation. More attention has been paid to human gene editing internationally, and relevant laws and regulations have been promulgated. However, most of them are only theoretical frameworks and have not been put into practice. Secondly, regarding the question of the safety of genetically modified products, Mr. Lyu stressed that the public should first be provided with enough rights to know and to choose. Thus, we are responsible for popularizing the theoretical knowledge related to genetically modified and synthetic biology, increasing publicity efforts, and paying more attention to the law for gene editing.

The communication with Mr. Lyu made us realize that we must always be responsible for the world in every step of project design and experiment.

Mr.Wang

Professor Wang Dai mainly focuses his research on the molecular pathogenic mechanism of pathogenic bacteria and his undergraduate and doctoral studies are related to medical biology. After graduation, Professor Wang carried out research work related to microbiology at the University of Edinburgh and the University of Glasgow. Currently, Professor Wang Dai is working at the School of Public Health at Xiamen University. He teaches theoretical and experimental courses in medical molecular biology and medical microbiology for undergraduates. He has published more than 14 representative papers.

In our project, we designed toxin-antitoxin systems to prevent horizontal gene transfer (HGT). Professor Wang told us that rapid HGT cannot be avoided from gram-negative bacteria such as E. coli to microbial communities in the soil. The transfer of fragments of plasmids also happens. Therefore, to minimize the risk of resistance gene HGT, Professor Wang suggested us inserting toxin genes into the position adjacent to resistance genes on plasmids. In addition, Professor Wang pointed out the deficiency of our toxin-antitoxin system based on E. coli. If the toxin is derived from E. coli, the entire system will show indiscriminate killing for E. coli present in the soil microbial ecology. He suggested us searching the literature to find suitable toxin-antitoxin systems from non-soil microorganisms. Finally, Professor Wang mentioned the importance of the actual dosage of bactericides or products, emphasizing the feasibility of the project design in practical applications. We should fully maintain microecological balance in the soil in practical application.

After communicating with Professor Wang, we realized that there were still shortcomings in the design of the project, especially in the design of the kill switch. In the design of the project, we should achieve the purpose of drought resistance without destroying the soil microecological balance.

Maintain cooperation with government departments and public organizations to publicize topics from a macro perspective and improve the current situation

Xiamen Science and Technology

We launched a face-to-face exchange with the public at Xiamen Science and Technology Museum. In this activity, we described the damage of drought and freeze, introduced our project, and propagated the related knowledge of synthetic biology. We hope that people can develop a good sense of water-saving, and face together with the problems of damage from freeze and drought.

Therefore, we focused on the ways and means to protect the environment in this activity. In the wonderful presentation and interesting games, many children have learned saving strategies for water resources.

One of the children said, "I have learned a lot of ways to save water in life, but also understand the concept of synthetic biology for the first time". Judging from the feedback from the participants, it was a successful public activity.

Xiamen Municipal Water Resources Bureau

We carried out an interview and survey in Xiamen Municipal Water Resources Bureau. The purpose of this survey is to investigate the climate and hydrology situation of Xiamen City and the impact of sudden drought on people's activities and lives.

To understand the existing means of forecasting and preventing drought at Xiamen Municipal Water Resources Bureau, we investigate the practical practices and difficulties faced by drought prevention.

We hope to obtain relevant information on drought monitoring and prevention, and try to solve the problem of weak ability of soil water retention based on synthetic biology, mitigating the impact of sudden drought.

Through the discussion, the team members learned that the Xiamen Municipal Water Resources Bureau mainly realizes the efficient distribution of water resources through various means, to ensure the living and production of water for people. When drought happens, water resources outside the region will be transferred to Xiamen through water source connectivity projects, such as the "Beixi Water Diversion Project".

The construction of these water conservancy projects has provided strong support for the water resources of Xiamen City.

Pursue cooperation with enterprises, so that the topic is more likely to be promoted and realized

Sanju Biological Company

To be able to further promote our subject to industrialization. We find that it is a good way to communicate with relevant enterprises to understand the information of the industry and pursue cooperation with enterprises. So, we contacted China's excellent biological agent enterprise, Sanju Biological Company, and carried out in-depth exchanges. At present, Sanju Biological Company owns many products that can be applied in fruit and vegetable crops, cash crops, food crops, and ecological cycles in aquaculture. The microbial product has been widely used in many fields such as harmless treatment of livestock manure, making great contributions to crop cultivation, pest control, ecological breeding, and environmental governance.

During the investigation, we introduced our projects and asked questions related to the development and usage of bactericides. The staff of Sanju Biological Company not only praised our design but also raised their concerns in terms of industry standards, giving us a deeper understanding of the gap between the subject design and industry standards. In terms of implementation methods, the staff of Sanju Biological Company also put forward their views. We learned that solid bacterioides are more convenient for packaging, transportation, and use, while liquid bacterioides can better maintain the metabolic products from bacteria with better quality. After this communication, we have reached an initial possibility of cooperation with the Sanju Biological Company.