Difference between revisions of "Team:NTU-LIHPAO-Taiwan/Practices"

Human Practices

Dig out

At the very beginning of our project, we set our minds on solving real life problems in modern society. It took some time, but we finally reached a consensus. We all agreed that everyone wants to live better, especially healthier lives. However, it seems strange that practically everyone does harm to their own health. So, what is the real problem? What's the appeal in harming oneself? Or is the public simply underinformed? We had absolutely no idea which was true, so we performed a random street survey.

This survey is quite simple and has only two purposes: to find out in what aspects of health we can help to improve and if possible, to give out some information about health. After standing on street for several days, we collected over 100 questionnaires and finally had a result.

[Click on here to see the Questionnaire (part 1)]

[Click on here to see the Questionnaire (part 2)]

[Click on here to see the Questionnaire (part 3)]

[Click on here to see the Questionnaire (part 4)]

In our design, we ask our subjects to sequence the importance and feasibility of the four aspects of health, namely proper diets, regular workouts, positive minds, and well habits. Then, after providing specific information about these aspects, ask again to sequence their importance and feasibility. One can imagine, that most people treasure regular workouts and well habits the most, and that they think to have proper diets is the most feasible thing among them.

However, it turns out quite astonishing that, after providing further information, like how many fruits and meat you should take every day, proper diets’ importance goes up, and feasibility down. Furthermore, by looking into the feedbacks about proper diets, one can find out that practically everyone’s meat and oil intake is too much, and vegetable, fruits, and dairy products too less. Hence, we saw a problem that, people are not aware of how much, or how less, they should take, therefore not able to eat in balance, not to tell to control their appetites.

[Click on here to see the Survey Result (part 1)]

[Click on here to see the Survey Result (part 2)]

[Click on here to see the Survey Result (part 3)]

[Click on here to see the Survey Result (part 4)]

Therefore, after a few debates, we set our project this year on helping obese patients, especially those who suffer in morbid obesity and cannot control their own appetite. Also, we realized that most people are ignorant of right things to do to keep in health, which pose a health risk to themselves. Thus, we planed to publicize a better lifestyle.

Publicize

By feeding information of health on our Facebook fan page, we successfully promote the right things to do to keep in health, and thus, we grow quite an amount of people concerning health issue on our fan page. But we were not satisfied through this, hence, we held an event to further promote a healthful lifestyle, face to face. It was a fantastic event, and we gained a lot of feedbacks, like: 63% said they gained some knowledge through this event, over 36% said they gained a lot; and there was one saying he cannot help but going back home instantly and share the knowledge he gained today to his family and friends! We’re all glad to get those feedbacks and happy that we have done something, though it is small, to impact and educate people.

Project Cooperated With Lihpao

Identity Identification and Paternity Testing by Major Histocompatibility Complex (MHC)

In human being, the major histocompatibility complex (MHC) is also called the human leukocyte antigen (HLA), which resides on chromosome 6 and is composed of 3.6 million of base pairs. It is also known as the region with highest gene density and with most abundant diversity in human chromosome. Therefore, it is called the chemistry fingerprints in human being. With the features mentioned above, we try to pick out several SNPs from HLA and consider the chromosomal crossover and mutation in order to construct an algorithm for identity and paternity testing.

Preliminary Screening of the Compatibility of Organ Transplantation by MHC

Since organ transplantation has become more and more crucial in medical treatments, in order to provide fast and low-antibody-needed screening, we hope to reach the goal of excluding donors with high differences by gene sequence screening before conducting antibody detection. This can not only reduce the samples, but also save a lot of time and money.

Possible ways in considered:

    (1) Reverse transcription from mRNA to cDNA to predict peptide sequence, though not totally correct, it still can cross out some incompatible samples.

    (2) By predicting the peptide sequence directly from DNA sequence, we can also reach the goal in (1). This is more complicated, for we have to know the cutting site of intron and exon. However, we can strike out the step of reverse transcription from mRNA.