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.
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.
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.
Media
At the beginning of June, the team were approached by Juliette Raynal, a journalist from the magazine "Industrie & Technologies" to talk about the project of the iGEM Pasteur 2015 team. She published the following article on the website and in the paper magazine of Industrie & Technologies.
Click here to read the article:
Public engagement
At the beginning of the summer, we hosted 9th graders from the middle school Germaine de Stäelat 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 the 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 Institut Pasteur 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 obtained my diploma of the National Superior School of Agronomy (AgroPrisTech) in 2007. During my Master at the Center for Research and Interdisciplinarity (CRI), I began working on synthetic biology. With a few classmates, we have also created the Synthetic Biology Club (SynBC). We then created the first iGEM Paris Bettencourt Team, in 2007.
→ What can synthetic biology provide to society?
Synthetic biology was created by biologists, electronic engineers and physicists content. They wanted to apply 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 in engineered biological systems: only a few articles have been published about the functioning these synthetic systems. Moreover, synthetic biology is more and more present in our life, through biofuels and drugs for instance, and many startups are being created nowadays.
→ What is the reaction of general public towards synthetic biology?
In France, many people are afraid of Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs), even though they are used everywhere by everyone. It is a more sensitive issue once GMOs affect our environment 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 ethic rules while changing our collective awareness as it becomes more present in our every day life.
Interview with other iGEM teams
To have external and diverse advice on our project and to answer ethicals questions, we used the meet-up hosted by iGEM Bordeaux to debate our project. Indeed we prepared a short survey to collect opinions of other iGEM members.
We would like to thanks the teams that have participated to this survey: Bordeaux (France), Paris_Saclay (France), Toulouse (France), Aix_Marseille (France) and iGEM KU_Leuven (Belgium).
→ How much are plastics present in oceans ?
The views differed greatly between people. The range was from 300 tons to more than 70 millions tons of plastic wastes in ocean. Overall, the answer was broadly underestimated, and surprised them..
Answer: about 300 000 tons
→ What kind of problems are caused by plastic waste in the oceans ?
For this question, people have agreed to say that the main problems due to plastic pollutants in the ocean are:
- The ingestion of plastic by wildlife causing the long-term poisoning of fishes, or other marine life. Consequently, this pollution impacts public health through sea food consumption.
- The disbalance of the ecological dynamics leading to invasive species development. Following plastic production, water rejections are rich in phosphate and nitrogen compounds, which lead to water eutrophization.
- Moreover, those environmental impacts are traduced in direct impacts for our economy
→ How can we fight against plastic waste in ocean ? ?
For the majority of interviewees, the best option is to educate the population:
- Inform the population on the risks incurred.
- Improve waste collection and recycling.
The idea of applying financial penalty was also mentioned.
For waste already present in the ocean, our colleagues thought about the collection of plastic macroparticles. The idea of PlastiCure for microparticles was mentioned.
→ How about ethics: What do you think about our project ?
According to them, to add a value to plastic waste appears to be a very good idea to battle ocean pollution because we will also produce a useful product. Some of them noticed that setting up our project could lead to a high energy consumption in order to build containment structures for our GMOs.
→ What are the advantages and disadvantages of our project?
Avantages:
- added a value to plastic waste
- protection of the environment
- possibility to manufacture other product than erythromycin A 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
- high cost of the project
- sensibility of biological system: Will the bacteria survive the conditions of plastic waste treatment?
- difficulty to recover erythromycin A and risk of environmental contamination with antibiotics.
→ The fight against the plastic in the oceans is a large-scale work.
Do you think that synthetic biology can help us overcome this problem?
Yes: Microorganisms has many advantages. They grow as long as they have essential nutrients and allow us to use several biological pathways to synthesize a compound. Synthetic biology is one of the tools of the future that will help us improve our way of life.
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 found in the Safety section
→ If we succeed and 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 it is possible to clean up the ocean with PlastiCure ?
No: Plastic waste, micro- and macro-particules, will not be easily collected. Plastic production keeps growing and produces a large amount of plastic waste. In order to be an efficient alternative, our bacteria needs to degrade faster than plastic is being produced. However, this project could still help reduce 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 obtained
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