Team:BNU-CHINA/Practices

Team:BNU-CHINA - 2015.igem.org

How the world affects our Sirens

Background

As a kind of plant pathogen, plant parasitic nematodes are widespread and can result in a wide distribution with their numerous hosts. They can result in severe plant diseases. It causes around 100 billion dollars economic loss each year, which accounts for 10% of the total agricultural loss^[1]. The nematodes attack is relatively severe in China at present, harming the agriculture and forestry in a considerable extent. Taking Bursaphelenchus xylophilus for example, there are 187 infected areas of Bursaphelenchus xylophilus in China announced by China’s Academy of Forestry which is widely spread in 16 provinces such as Zhejiang, Jiangsu, Fujian(3rd announcement of China’s State Forestry Administration in 2015). Bursaphelenchus xylophilus, the head of forestry pest being listed, is often referred to as the “forest fire without smoke” for its grave damage to the pinewood in the infected area, and it badly threatens the forestry economy, landscape and famous scenery, nature reserve and important ecotope of China^[2-3]. What’s more, other plant parasitic nematodes such as Meloidogyne spp. and Heterodera spp. also do great harm to agriculture and forestry.

Fig. 1 Pine wood nematode disease distribution in China (2014)

We still give priority to traditional chemical method for nematode prevention in China. The most widely used nematocides are isofenphos-methyl, carbofuran, cadusafos and niklor^[4-5]. However, the present category of nematicides is too limited to choose from. On one hand，development of nematicides for various reasons is disabled or stopped; on the other hand, many of the existing ones also face the problems of high cost, undesirable prevention effect, severe environment pollution and allowing nematodes obtaining rsistance to nematicides etc. Therefore, even though the new kind of biological prevention technique has great potential, the protection successfully used in laboratory hasn’t been appealed to practice, because of the limit of technology, the environment influence and many more factors like these^[1,4-5]. So it has a bright future about controlling nematodes.

Embarking from the actual problems and focusing on nematodes attack, our human practices aim to direct our project by the way of researching, investigation, interviewing and collaboration. Additionally, it makes synthetic biology as well as our project well reach out to the public so as to lay a formation for the application and popularization of our projects. And in this way, we hope to take synthetic biology to practical application from laboratory genuinely, and to realize the value of scientific research.

Laws & Regulations

It is universally acknowledged that the biosafety problem is a social problem which not only needs scientific researchers to make achievements in labs, but also needs the government to lay down some policies and laws for specification at the same time. In recent years, as scientists have made great progress in the field of life science, Chinese government is attaching growing importance to bio-safety problems and legislating to consummate the bio-safety and environmental safety of China. In order to get a clearer understanding of those laws and regulations, we interviewed Lecturer Yan Houfu in the School of Law, Beijing Normal University. Yan is a doctor of environmental law who graduated from Peking University. He is enthusiastic in environmental protection. He pays a close and long-term attention to the environmental laws and regulations in China and has obtained great achievements in the relevant research.

We headed for the School of Law to visit Dr. Yan on July 9th, 2015 and conducted an in-depth communication of bills on bio-safety and protection of peasants’ rights and interests, etc. From this interview we learned that the government of China adopts a fair attitude to the legislation of bio-safety. As to the guarantee of peasants’ rights and interests, the government furnishes cover to the peasants from the insurance companies who are supposed to offer compensation to peasants if large scale insect pests or diseases occur.

In addition, we discussed with Dr. Yan about the social issue of transgenic plants. Dr. Yan expressed that he didn’t know much about the biological principle of transgenosis product as a researcher of law, and he realized some of his previous opinions were unscientific after communicating with us. Therefore, he suggested us professionals in the biology field go to the public frequently and improve the popularization of science, and by this means, clear up the public’s misunderstandings of biology generated from incomprehension.

Appendix: the summary of interviewing Dr.Yan Houfu.

Feasibility

Interview of Prof. Liu Xingzhong

Our team went to the Institute of Microbiology, Chinese Academy of Science at 10 am on August 4th, consulting Professor Liu Xingzhong about our program in terms of feasibility and operation. He studies the prevention and control of plant parasitic nematode with parasitic fungi. Through this visit, we learned more about plant parasitic nematodes from a scientific perspective with the advice of Professor Liu. In the meantime, we improved our experiment and focused on the solutions to the most pressing scientific problems, to make the program more feasible.

Fig. 4 Differences in verification experiment of limonene attractivity to nematodes (a. before b.after )

We introduced our experimental design and scheme to professor Liu and posed some questions we had met in the process of communication, especially in allusion to the protocols of detecting whether nematodes can be attracted by our attractant or not. Initially, we followed the protocol mentioned by Olivia Margiel^[6] that divides the NGM culture medium into four parts, of which the opposite two were parallel controlled so that we could set up two experimental groups and two control groups on one plate. However, professor Liu Xingzhong figured out that there may be some deficiency in this protocol, with which he put forward several improvement proposals. With his suggestion, we changed the method to dividing the NGM medium into two parts equally to serve as experimental group and control group respectively.

Besides，we improved our experimental design in later experiment with the proposal of professor Liu, which in turn, helped us figure out the problem of non-ideal laboratory outcome in former experiments and lay a foundation to the later experiments which turned out to have good results.

Apart from the communication in protocols, processor Liu introduced us his research work as well, from which he made a estimation to our project. He highly affirmed it, considering our project of value in both scientific research and practical application. He suggested us proceed from the reality and he was expecting to see our project moving to the actual use to provide a new method and idea to the prevention of nematode pest present in China.

Practice in Hebei Province

To comprehend the current situation that nematodes damage the environment and how agricultural workers work in their lives, our team went to Ceyu Town, Shijiazhuang City, Hebei Province on August 17th and 18th and made a firsthand research on comprehensive degree that local inhabitants know about plant parasitic nematodes and whether they will take necessary preventable measures.

Fig. 5 Field investigation in Hebei Province

Earlier literature indicates that there are plant parasitic nematode problems in Hebei Province, and Soybean cyst nematode(Heterodera glycines) causes severe problems specially^[7], so we communicated with local government and residents to know about whether they had heard plant parasitic nematodes before, and what measures were taken to deal with nematode problem.

Four parts were involved in our investigation as below:

(1) We had an interview with the official in the Agricultural Service Center in Ceyu Town;
(2) We communicated with local pesticide retailer;
(3) We talked with local farmers;
(4) We gathered soil and plant samples in farmlands

We get the following information from our talk with the official of local Comprehensive Agricultural Service Center in Ceyu Town:

(1)Chinese government has settled Fundamental Comprehensive Agricultural Service Centers and such institution can instruct farmers to work better; we have also understood that the main duty of the centers is coordinating with the instruction of superior governments and then deploying work.
(2)The area of farmland of Jingxing County is relatively small, with the average area of that local farmers have is about 334 m², and the main crops planted there are corn, millet and soybean.
(3)Most pests are visible in the daily work of farmers who use Kresoxim methyl and cypermethrin, and the standard of using pesticides is various; still many farmers are trying to enhance the pesticide efficiency by increasing the dosage of pesticides.

However, officials knew little about what nematodes had damaged to local agriculture when being asked. To a further vision, we contacted to local pesticide retailers for knowing plant diseases and insect pests.

Fig. 6 Interview pesticide retailers in Ceyu Town

During the interview, we noticed some description about nematodes in the algricultrual reference book he offered.

Then we chatted to inhabitants in their houses. They said that they often asked the pesticide retailer we had talk before for farming and killing pests. They would only care about visible pests in agricultural work instead of invisible nematodes, therefore they didn’t know much about nematodes.

We found that villagers lacked basic knowledge about nematodes. To develop their knowledge, we popularized knowledge about nematodes and the damage nematodes might do in detail.

To verify whether there was a potential possibility of nematode problem by ourselves, we also brought soil and plant samples back from Ceyu Town and did further analysis in our laboratory to help local villagers know about pest situation in there farmland. We acquaint lots of kind villagers who supported us warmly and gave us abundant suggestions and feedback during the investigation. This trip also makes us get the chance to learn about the situation in the practical production process so that we can combine our project with the reality smoothly. Meanwhile, we helped local residents a lot in many ways – we have learned that local agricultural workers don’t know much about invisible pests so they won’t be able to take emergency measures when they face to nematode problem. So it’s important to popularize damage that nematodes will make and design a thorough and emergency plan in the future.

Fig. 7 We took soil and plant samples from Ceyu Town

Safety

Safety mechanism

In order to have a further understanding of other countries’ policies of bio-safety, we surfed the homepage of the iGEM 2015 and had a brief understanding about other teams’ project. We collected the teams which had the correlative subject with our team and e-mailed them in order to communicate with them about topics related to the human practice. We asked them common plant diseases in their country and the related laws and regulations of bio-safety. The questions are shown as the following.

Did you do any survey about agricultural disasters? If you did, what kind of disease did the crops suffer form?
Does the government have any policies or laws about the protection of farmers’ right?
Does the government have any policies or laws about the bio-safety?
How about the usage of pesticides?

According to the email replied, we have a brief understanding of how other teams do human practice. The most common forms are interviews, questionnaire surveys or others alike. In addition, they told us about the situation of plant diseases, the usage of pesticides and the regulations about bio-safety. Here are some of their replies.

This year, our team’s human practice project focused on qualitative study of stakeholders' perceptions through interviews. The shortlisted stakeholders were asked about the application microbial biosensor in their fields, instead of quantitative study through questionnaire.

Farmers mentioned the possibilities of suffering from deficiency diseases; however, the possibility is slim with their good managements and following the principles of sustainability. Additionally, some mentioned the invasion of pests, such as fruit flies. However, since this is not one of the objectives in our research, no follow-up questions were asked.

I'm sorry to tell you we don't have professionals specialised in laws and regulations in HK in our team. We believed farmers are protected by local laws for any loss due to extreme weather or urban development.

Ordinance, was set up by HKSAR govt, which forbids any deliberate release of GMO, except, with government approval. Further information can be directed to HKSAR Agricultural, Fisheries and Conservation Dept. The applications of artificial pesticides have to be registered and approved by HKSAR. The corresponding dept will be Agricultural, Fisheries and Conservation Dept. and the Centre for Food and Safety. Since our focus is not on the application of the pesticides, we don't have further comments on the policies and laws on it. Nevertheless, local farmers seldom use chemical pesticides, because of our excellent geographical location. And most farmers rely on traditional method to kill pests, e.g. fruit flies, to protect pre-mature fruits, e.g. papaya, from damages.

——HKUST-Rice

According to the communication through e-mails, we have found that almost each team has done some surveys about laws and regulations of bio-safety and peasants’ right protecting. But every team has its focus on their programs, so not every team gets a thorough understanding about the law and regulation about bio-safety and peasants’ right protection. According to the results we got from our surveys, we found that the public don’t know the laws and regulations about this area very well. And the replays from other teams verified our finding.

In our opinion, if we want to design an experiment, especially an experiment about sensitive social issues, we should firstly know the laws and regulations on this issue well, so that we could establish a series of safety precautions about our program. After that, we could begin our experiment. So we appeal all the teams that take part in iGEM to take a focus on bio-safety and the relative laws and regulations, so that we can make sure to avoid accidents and protect the safety of people, whether they are involved in the experiment or not.

How will Sirens affect the world

Conferences

NCTU Conference

During July 19th, 2015-July 24th, 2015, NCTU Conference was organized and held by National Chiao Tung University (NCTU) in Taiwan, Hsinchu. Our team, BNU-China, had the chance to exhibit our project in the conference. During the conferecne, we introduced our project to the whole attendees. Meanwhile, communication and mutual learning among the teams provided us with the opportunity to broad our horizon and help us acquaint more people with our project as well as our university, Beijing Normal University (BNU).

Owing to the strong line-up of the attendees, including several well-known universities, we got the chance to illustrate the harm of nematodes and the aim of our project to the most outstanding biological researchers in Asia, aiming to make corporate progress during the communication. From the perspective of synthetic biology, we were looking forward to finishing the transformation of E. coli by the means of genetic engineering. At the same time, we were hoping to enrich our research content as well as promote its feasibility and application value by using mathematical modeling and device invention. It was thought to help bring up a more eco-friendly, economical and effective method to prevent and eliminate nematode disaster compared with the current one. The exchange experience made our original idea step out of BNU, and made us move forward to Asia, even to the world. The prospect encouraged our team members and offered us new inspirations and ideas which were the significant innovation of synthetic biology in biological control. Besides, the summit managed to urge undergraduates to apply the theory into practice, which is an alternative starting point for students to go out of laboratory and meet the social demand. It had fully revealed modern undergraduates’ consciousness and determination for the social responsibility.

CCiC

On August 14th, 2015, BNU-CHINA took part in the CCiC in Peking University, which was hosted by Peking University. A greater number of teams participated in this conference than the NCTU conference. After preparing for a month, we had a better experiment design scheme, achieved positive results to some extent, and made progress on mathematical modeling and device setting with efforts of all team members. In the conference, each team conducted in-depth communication and exchanged ideas on their own projects. The inspiring spark collided by thoughts and innovation among the teams made the attendees reap substantial benefits. At the conference, combining the improvement guided by the former exchange, we exhibited trail of thought and innovation to the attending teams of Chinese well-known universities with more complete and lucid system. In addition, we fully explained the scientific and practical value of our project which offered more people the access to know about the harm of roundworms and the impact of our project. In the meantime, we also held open attitude towards the sincere suggestions and comments from other teams.

Interteam Communication

BIT-China

We visited BIT to communicate with team BIT-China in August 11th, 2015. During the seminar we explained our project to each other and discussed the problems existed, based on which we put forward some improvement schemes together. Meanwhile, we were honored to visit their labs and gained abundant experience of organizing and managing a team, based on which our two teams formed a long-term symbiosis. And team BIT-China , in return, visited our lab twice in the later month. They offered to assemble a biobrick for us, and we assisted them to establish the entire model of material changes in the control of Acid-base regulation.

FAFU-CHINA

After CCiC meeting, we established partnership with team FAFU-CHINA, who visited our lab on August 15th, 2015 and viewed our project in detail. As they could contact a professor who is committed to nematodes, FAFU-CHINA offered to consult the professor and proposed us with several suggestions that will improve our project as the speed of nematode movement should be considered, for example. Meanwhile, considering that this is the first year for FAFU to take part in iGEM, it was our pleasure to share some of our experiences of this competition, like how to manage a iGEN team, with them.

ZJU-China

In the NCTU Conference, we found that our idea is somehow similar to ZJU-China. Both of us are making use of some toxin, yet we designed our projects in a different way. Therefore, two teams went through a heated discussion during the conference. They suggested us to add the regulating mechanism to the process of synthesizing attractant and toxin, and they helped us with modeling as well. As for us, we proposed a way of improving their efficiency by adding attractant. After the conference, we still kept touch online, and we maintained partnership as to equipment and experiments. They even offered us the original biobrick and the data of toxin to expand our database. Anyway, we really appreciate everything they did to help us with building our bi-directional transcription system.

Voluntary & Scientific Publicity

WeChat public platform

In order to inform the public of latest state of our project at first time and help them learn our program much more conveniently, we set up a public platform of BNU-iGEM.

WeChat is a very popular social app in China. You can apply for a public account in the name of group and publish some of the contents on the platform regularly. Users of the weChat just need to follow our account to accept our RSS. This app is widely used in diverse age groups. So we took advantage of popularity of weChat in China, and to satisfy our needs of the external publicity of our project with this app. Finally we presented our public platform of weChat. From this platform, we published the presentations of iGEM, the progress of our projects, the processing of our human practice project, the public science popularization scientific article and many other content regularly.

Fig. 13 WeChat public plotform of BNU-CHINA
Through this platform of weChat, we realized the real-time interaction with the public. It also increases the social influence of our project, as more people will know the iGEM and BNU-CHINA.

Through this platform of weChat, we realized the real-time interaction with the public. It also increases the social influence of our project, as more people will know the iGEM and BNU-CHINA.

Soil nematode screening

During our survey in Hebei Province we collected soil and plant samples containing the whole plant of soybean with dwarfish stem and yellow leaves whose growth were apparently slower than the other conspecies around. The samples were processed immediately on returning to laboratory, to observe the condition of nematodes and to conduct some statistics analysis.

Fig. 14 Soil nematodes screening in our lab

The sample was dealt following the modified Baermann funnel method. First, roots of the sample are cut off and split into matchstick-shaped slices, which, after packaged with gauze, are immersed with aseptic water for 12 hours. Then, 50 gram liquid samples collected from the immersion are observed and compared with the aseptic water the next day. It was observed that nematodes presented in 4 of the samples while no nematodes was found in the contrast groups. Photograph of the experimental group and control group were displayed as follow.

Fig. 15 The observed result of the isolated nematodes from sampled gathered in Heibei field

Afterwards we consulted professor Li Hongmei in the College of Plant Protection, Nanjing University to find out the classification of the extracted nematodes. Professor Li informed us that according to esophagus features, the nematode from figure-A can be identified as Aphelenchida which possibly has something to do with plant parasite, whereas nematodes B~E are Rhabditida that live saprophytism and are not plant parasite, and nematode F is recognized as Dorylaimida that lives a free life. Therefore we can conclude that there actually were nematodes as plant parasite in the samples we collected. Few as the farmers may seem, the potential threatening of the agriculture nematode still exists.

However, according to our previous investigation, we found that the local farmers had no idea of the nematode pest, and meanwhile the relevant administrative department hadn’t prepare any contingency plan at all, which indicated a possibility of huge financial loss if nematode pest broke out some day. So we are looking forward to a further investigation and popularization of science in our future work, testing the nematodes condition in soil and popularize some knowledge relevant to nematodes and its prevention to the local residents. And in this way we hope that we can help them work in the agricultural grass-roots to nip the nematode possible disaster in the bud.

Proposal

According to our investigation, we summarized our finding into a proposal which may offer guidance to the state government. At the same time, we hope that every team in this competition may focus on the precaution of the nematode attack, and disseminate the harms of the nematode attack to the public together.

Dear iGEM Foundation & all iGEM teams:

We are team BNU-CHINA. After our three-month investigation in the rural area, we discovered that there were many omissions in prevention and treatment of the nematode outbreak. The local government failed to take the correct methodology to preclude and deal with the attack and there was also a short in agro-technician in the countryside as well. As a result, whenever there is an outbreak, the local farmers will suffer a heavy loss in crop yield. So we hope that we could share the knowledge of the nematode attack with more people, which may be helpful to improve the situation. At the same time, we also wrote a proposal to attract government’s attention to help the villagers. Here is the letter:

Honorable officials of agricultural department:

We are an iGEM team from Bejing Normal University, BNU-CHINA. iGEM is the highest-level competition in synthetic biology. The purpose of this competition is to build a biological model through the technology of synthetic biology based on relevant issues. The ultimate goal for us is to solve the practical and momentous problems in agriculture, environment protection, human health and so forth. This year our topic is the prevention of the agricultural nematodes. Plant parasitic nematode is a common kind of agricultural pests. There are many kinds of nematodes including Meloidogyne spp., Heterodera spp., Bursaphelenchus xylophilus and so on. These nematodes jeopardize the crops and woods. In the process of our project, we step out of the campus and to the countryside to do a practical investigation in our leisure time.

During our investigation, we found the following problems:

The strength of supervision of the agricultural comprehensive serving center in county is very weak， and whose connection with the local habitants is not close enough. The staff doesn’t communicate with the residents in time and the feedback is not very prompt. They can’t play a good role in service.
We are lack of professional agricultural guidance staff. And the farmers use the pesticide blindly without the proper technical guidance. And we don’t have an effective emergency plan when the plague outbreaks. Furthermore, we can’t ensure the yield of the farmers through economic crops.
The science popularization of the details about the agricultural disasters face lots of adverse conditions. Many farmers can’t have a clear identification of the nematodes because they are too small for farmers to have a right categorization. So the protection of the crops is not perfect enough. It will be quite difficult to control the disaster if it bursts suddenly.

Based on the problems above, we brought up the following suggestions.

The government sectors should strengthen the communication with the local farmers and understand what the real demand of the common people. And the service items should be set to satisfy the real need of the farmers.
We should encourage more technicians to work in the field and support the farmers and help them know their field well. In addition, we should provide them with more details of the solutions to agricultural disasters.
We need to establish a complete system of preventing the damage of the nematodes before it happens.

These are the conclusions and suggestions of this project above. We hope the related government departments could adopt our advice. And we also hope we can build a complete database for the precaution of the agricultural disasters from now on. More details will be shown at the following website. (Know more about our database, please click here.) We believe we will help the government as well as the farmers to solve more problems.

Voluntary & Scientific Publicity

Scientific propaganda in rural schools

China has quite vast land as well as the complexed terrain. Due to the intricate geographical environment and the poor traffic condition, the education levels of some countrysides are comparatively low. The rural population are lack of the basic knowledge of agriculture. Whereas our project combines with the current agricultural production closely , besides we are members of the best normal universities in China, so it is our responsibilities that prompt us to come into rural schools to propagandize the agricultural pests damage, especially for the nematodes. Aiming at this, we did volunteering public science education for a week.

On august 23th, 2015, our team came to Shangzhong Town, Lipin County in Guizhou Province and started our scientific propaganda. We introduced the common plant parasitic nematodes such as Meloidogyne spp. and Bursaphelenchuss xylophilus in the forestry and agriculture. We told the students the damage of the nematodes and the symptoms when the plants were infected. In addition we introduced our project “Sirens” to the students in straightaway. We told them how to attract and kill nematodes in our project. This let them have a brief understanding of biological prevention and control. We taught them how to treat agricultural disasters and how important biology is in social activities.

Fig. 16 Provide with science courses in countrysides

Open day of BNU lab

On september 8th , 2015, freshmen of collage of life science were welcomed to the BNU-CHINA laboratory. At the beginning of their new term, with the invitation of our team, they came to the iGEM laboratory. They got in touch with the iGEM and got a brief understanding of our project this year.

We started our propaganda from Greek mythology Sirens. Through the old story that Sirens attracted sailors by her beautiful sound and then killed them, we introduced our project about killing nematodes by a very simple and clear way. We also introduced our members, the responsibilities of different groups, the situation of our human practices and the expectations for the future of iGEMers and so on. Because they will be the core members in the future. We let them know something about the iGEM team and have more information about the damage of the nematodes. We hope they can love our team. And we are looking forward that these freshmen will become the future stars of our team and we also expect these iGEMers will make great contributions to the iGEM or even in synthetic biology in the future.

The opening of the laboratory not only attracted the freshmen of our college, but also attracted reporters of our university. They interviewed our team members and we introduced our project briefly.

Voluntary teaching in Guizhou Province

As the best normal university in China, we are amenable to the future of teachers. Our team members may become one teachers and bring the edge technology and knowledge to China one day. In order to fulfill the duty of teaching students where the education conditions are poor and propaganda our project more widely, we came to Shangzhong National Middle School in Liping county, GuiZhou province. We volunteered to do woluntary education for one week.

It was the first week for the new term from August 24th to 28th in Shangzhong National Middle School. But what was different from the usual was that they found that the students from College of Life Science, Beijing Normal University became their teachers. Our team members organized a supporting teaching team with the cooperation of Youth League Committee of our school. Except the regular lessons, the most important thing is to combine the knowledge with the practical problem in order to cultivate the interest in science especially in life science. We held a series of extra-curricular activities such as scientific knowledge competitions to enrich their after-school life. Though we only tought them for one week, the children are familiar with us very quickly and they became more positive and optimistic under the influence of us. They are full of hope towards future.

The education in China is out of balance. In the east coastal city of China, the education is advanced while the education is not very consummate in the west of China. This is because the transportation is not convenient and the economy isn’t developed enough. In order to let them contact with the wonderful world outside mountains and broaden their horizons, we want to enlighten their thoughts and their ways of thinking. What’s more, we hope to cultivate their passion for science as well as the responsibility for the society.

Fig.19 Voluntary education in Guizhou Province

Appendix the summary of interviewing Dr.Yan Houfu.

Interviewer: Is there any act aiming at the biological security in our country?

Yan: In China, there are two kinds of acts on biological security. One is about the invasion of alien species. Another is about the issue of genetically modified organisms. And there are relevant laws, administrative regulations and other related policies about transgenic organisms on various levels.

In 1993, the State Science and Technology Commission (known as the current Ministry of Science and Technology) formulated the first regulation in China on the biological safety that is still effective now. The second law about the issue of genetically modified organisms (GM organisms) was the Seed Law formulated in 2000. The article 14 prescribed that “ the selection, experiment, verification and popularization of transgenic plant verities shall be subject to security assessment, and strict security control measures shall be taken. The relevant departments of the State Council shall formulate the specific implementation measures and approaches.”

The Chinese government takes a strict look at biological products, including transgenic products, and requires the labeling of GM food. The article 69 of the Food Safety Law which was just revised in 2015 formulated that “the production and operation of GM food should be labeled according to the law.” This law will be implemented on October 1st. China has the strictest regulation on GM agriculture. In 2001, the State Council enacted the Regulation on the Safety of Agricultural Genetically Modified Organisms, which is the highest regulation of the GM crops in our country. According to this regulation, the Ministry of Agriculture formulated three regulations, including the Implementation Regulation on the Safety of Import of Agricultural Genetically Modified Organisms, the Regulation on the Biological label of Agriculture Genetically Modified Organisms and the Regulation on the Safety Assessment of Agriculture Genetically Modified Organisms.

Besides the GM problems, the Chinese government also has formulated several regulations to standardized the biological safety in experiments. The State Council also enacted the Regulations on Biological Safety of Pathogenic Microorganisms Laboratory. According to this, the Ministry of Agriculture formulated the Regulations on Biological Safety of Highly Pathogenic Microorganisms Laboratory. And the Ministry of Environmental Protection formulated the Regulations on the Biological Safety of Pathogenic Microorganisms Laboratory Environment.

Overall, the Chinese government is very cautious to the issue of biological safety, especially the safety of GM food. The Chinese government is cautious about commercial production but strongly supports the GM research.

Interviewer: Are you familiar with the Primary-level Agricultural Technology Promotion Station in rural areas? Is there any relevant regulation to standardize it?

Yan: I am not really familiar with this. But it could be found online that there are Agricultural Technical Promotion and Service Center belonging to the Ministry of Agriculture in every province. China has limited amount of arable land and a large population. The primary-level agricultural technologists play an important role in farming process.

Interviewer: What kind of regulations have been formulated by Chinese government on protection of peasants’ rights? Does the government have corresponsive measures if there were to be large-scale damage caused by insects?

Yan: There aren’t many special laws for peasants because all people are equal to the law. People have the same fundamental rights. However, if there are large-scale insect pests, there are some regulations that could help peasants. One of the important regulations is the Regulation on the Aid of Natural Disasters, which is a social security mechanism formulated in 2010. The special fund is managed by the Ministry of Finance and the Ministry of Civil Affairs. Besides this, the Ministry of Agriculture formulated Development of crop disease and pest information management Regulations. This regulation regulated the technical problems about spraying the pesticides in cultivation avoiding the pesticides’ overuse due to the lack of professional knowledge.

Besides this, the State Council formulated the Agricultural Insurance Act in 2012. The act regulates peasants could get compensation with their insurance when there are natural disasters. And the Ministry of Finance would give appropriate allowance to peasants with insurance.

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