Team:Lethbridge/Practices

iGEM

Practices

For the policies and practices portion of our project we focused on what the ethical implications of our project would be, whether the benefit would be worth the potential risk. We looked into current pesticide methods to survey their advantages and disadvantages. We examined off-target and non-target effects by ensuring the target sequences we selected were compared against the entire database of sequenced genomes using the NCBI BLAST program. We also spoke with various experts and had a panel discussion regarding the efficacy of our project from the lab to the field. We contacted major small molecule pesticide distributors to estimate the current cost analysis. Finally, we collaborated with the Canadian Food Inspection Agency and Health Canada to further explore the ethical implications of our project.

Risks

The off-target risks of current pesticide use and our emphasis on preventing off-target effects.

Stakeholders

The cost analysis for current small molecule pesticides.

Current Problems

The issues with current pest control methods including small molecule pesticides, crop care and other pest control methods.

Public Outreach

During our project we spoke with a Fusarium research scientist, an organic farmer, and an agricultural innovator/reserach scientist about our project and what they do.

We also collaborated with the Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) and Health Canada to discuss the potential ethical implication of our project.

From left to right: Anas Eranthodi, Ph.D Candidate; Andrew Mans, Organic Farmer; Ken Coles M.Sc. B.Sc. P.Ag, General Manager Farming Smarter.

We will be hosting an additional presentation approximately 20 mins long in order to cover our policy and practices as we were not able to include all of it in our presentation. We will announce a time and location for our policy and practices presentation at the end of our project presentation. If you are unable to attend our presentation please visit our Facebookpage to find out when and where this will be happening!