Team:Pasteur Paris/Practices
Conferences
Our team took part in different conferences, doing a presentation of the iGEM competition as well as of our project.
ECCO XXXIV:
The ECCO XXXIV, European Culture Collections as tools in research and biotechnology, is a yearly conference at the Institut Pasteur where scientists present their work. The meeting focused on evolution, biodiversity, omics, regulations and news about MIRRI - Microbial Resource Research Infrastructure - and other ESFRI infrastructures. Our team was presented with the possibility of presenting the PlastiCure project. We were given the chance to present and promote our work on plastic pollution and synthetic biology.Watch our video!
Maison des Océans:
The "Maison des océans" or "Institut Océanographique" offers each week a conference by professionals to the public. We talked about our project after a wonderful presentation by "Opération 7ème Continent", a group of scientists and explorers that sail in the ocean to observe how plastic waste impacts our ecosystem. This event happened for us after a Skype conversation with the organizers.See our video!
Amgen Scholars Cafe:
The Institut Pasteur is one of the host Research Centers of the Amgen Scholars Program. The students asked us to present our project briefly at one of their weekly gathering. Furthermore, we participated together to the conference of Françoise Barré-Sinoussi, 2008 medicine Nobel Prize for her work in the identification of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) as the cause of AIDS.
We also took part in a few scientific events, without being the organizers. We attended the Scientific and Technic Communication Patchwork meeting in a Parisian cafe where scientists, artists and journalists came to talk about opening the public to the main scientific issues of our time. We went to the World’s Ocean Day at the UNESCO, where we took part in the UNESCO Campus where a number of students discussed how we could change the way people think about Climate Change, and more specifically the way it affects the ocean. The problem of plastic pollution in the ocean also came up. We sat in the several conferences. We also went to support the French FameLab Contestants in Paris at the regional and the national finals. At this event, the contestants, mostly PhD students and researchers, had to sum up a scientific subject in 3 minutes. The themes were very diverse and varied from cancer to gravity to name a few.
Public engagement
At the beginning of the summer, we hosted 9th graders from the middle school Germaine de Stäel, at the Pasteur Institute. We gave them a small lecture about the basics of Biology and Crystallography before taking them to the lab. We showed them how to perform a Western Blot, and then we supervised the making of their own. After this little session, we taught them a bit about microscopes, how it works and how to use them. We were very pleased that they chose us and Institut Pasteur to learn more about science !
Interview with a professional
Interview of David Bikard, CSO & Cofounder of Eligo Bioscience:
Eligo Bioscience was founded in May 2014 as a spin-off from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the Rockefeller University based on the discoveries from the Marraffini and the Lu labs. After winning several startup competitions, the company has recently raised a €2M seed-funding round and has settled its headquarters within the Pasteur Institute in the heart of Paris.
The French startup spun out of MIT and Rockefeller last year, where cofounders developed highly precise antimicrobials. Eligo’s technology is based on CRISPR/Cas9, the trendy and invaluable molecular tool for making sequence-specific cuts in DNA. Cas9 is a nuclease that binds a small guide RNA (sgRNA). The nuclease will cleave DNA if, and only if, it encounters DNA with a sequence complementary to its guide RNA. Rewriting the guide RNA readily repurposes Cas9 to target new DNA sequences. Their mission is to build a rich pipeline of « eligobiotics » to solve unmet needs in a wide range of industries: health, cosmetics, food, agriculture...(http://eligo-bioscience.com/)
→ What is your scientific background?
I have a degree in Agricultural Engineering from AgroPrisTech. For my final year, I did the Interdisciplinary Approaches in Life Sciences (AIV) Master, at the Center for Research and Interdisciplinarity (CRI). I began working on synthetic biology when I created the Synthetic Biology Club (SynBC), with a few classmates. We then created the first iGEM Paris Bettencourt Team, in 2007.
→ What can synthetic biology provide to society?
Synthetic biology was created by a gathering of biologists, electronic engineers and physicists who applied engineering concepts to biology, in order to rationalize and predict the behavior of biological systems. Today, synthetic biology has a broader definition and means for the most part genetic engineering. However, there are still limits to our knowledge of biological systems and only a few articles have been published about functioning synthetic systems. Synthetic biology is more and more present in our life, through biofuels and drugs for example and many startups are being created nowadays.
→ What is the reaction of general public towards synthetic biology?
In France, many people are afraid of GMO, even though they are used everywhere and everyone is being exposed to them. It is a more sensitive question once GMOs affect our environments and our health. However, genetic engineering is a promising field of synthetic biology, especially on the development of diseases’ treatments. Like every new technology, synthetic biology is questioning the already established ethics while changing our collective awareness as it becomes more present in our lives.
Interview with other iGEM teams
To have externals advices on our project and to answer to ethicals questions, we took advantages of the meetup hosted by Bordeaux team to debate about our project. Indeed we prepared a short survey to collect the opinion of other iGEM members.
We would like to thanks the teams that have participated to this survey : Bordeaux, Paris_Saclay, Toulouse, Aix_Marseille and KU_Leuven.
→ How much plastic is there in oceans ?
The views differed greatly between people. Some of them thought about 300 tons of plastic wastes in ocean while other said us more than 70 millions. Overall, we noticed that the real number was broadly underestimated and surprised them (about 300 000 tons).
→ what kind of problems can be due to plastic waste in oceans ?
For this questions, people are basically agree to say that the mains problems are :
- Ingestion by wildlife : causing the poisoning of the fauna and consequently, the poisoning of human because we can eat infected fishes
- Degradation of the flora. An exemple is the eutrophication that occurs in our rivers more and more often.
- Economic problem related to pollution of beach resort
- Bacteria accumulation : problem of public health
→ How can we struggle against plastic wastes in ocean ?
For the majority of interviewees, the best option is prevention by informing the population about the risks incurred and by facilitating the waste recycling and collection.The idea to apply financial penalty was also mentioned For waste already present in ocean, our interlocutors thought about the collection of these wastes (microparticles), and the idea of plastiCure for microparticles was raised.
→ Now a question about ethic in PlastiCure : What do you think about our project ?
According to them, add a value to plastic wastes appear to be a very good idea to wrestle with oceans pollution. Indeed, in this way, we do not combat only plastic but we will also produce a useful product. In an other hand, some of them noticed that set up a such project could lead to an acute energy consumption in light of amenities that we should have to contain our GMO.
→ What are the advantages and disadvantages of our project?
Avantages:
- add a value to waste
- protect the environment
- possibility to manufacture other product than erythromycin by using the same method.
- With bacteria, we can use a very complicated pathways to produce product that couldn't be made by chemical method.
Disadvantages:
- Need a long time to set up the project
- expensive
- Do the bacteria will survive in treatment condition of plastic waste ?
- Difficulty to recover erythromycin and risk of environmental contamination with erythomycine
→ The fight against the plastic in the oceans is a large-scale work.
Do you think that synthetic biology can help us to overcome this problem?
Yes: Microorganisms has many advantages. they can grow as long as they have nutrients and allow us to use very complicated pathways to synthesize a compound. Moreover, they work independently and do not need staff. This, is not compatible with traditional methods.
Synthetic biology is the tool of the future that will help us to solve major problems.
No: Oceans cover 70% of the planet, and synthetic biology is a very long process to put in place.
Not sure : Some of our interviewees think that synthetic biology could process the microparticles but not the microparticles
→ GMOs are very disputed. What can we do to contribute to the safety of our project?
This question was broadly discuss with the Paris-Saclay team who work on a biosafety project. The result of this discussion is in the Safety section
→ If we succeed to commercialize our drug, do you think you will buy it ?
Everybody agrees to say yes : drugs are already manufactured by bacteria so they didn't have any problem with that
→ Do you think that is possible to clean up ocean (and the world) with PlastiCure ?
No : Due to microparticles, it will be very difficult. Furthermore, plastic will not be easily to collect. Nowadays, industrialization keeps growing more and more and it produces a huge amount of plastic waste. So we need to have a processing capacity very quick to offset the production owever, this project could reduce the plastic waste and have a positive effect on the environment.
→ For our last question, we decided to test whether iGEM members sort or not their plastic waste. This is the diagrams we obtain
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