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Team:British Columbia/humanpractices
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var ACADEMIC = "In choosing the academic professional, we selected our interviewees to be individuals whose opinions were expected to be bias based on their academic background. Professors in land and food systems, ethics and philosophy and microbiology who have studied genetically modified organisms were asked to participate in our professional interview. Their responses opened our eyes to factors that we had not considered previously. <b>Click to view the interview questions.</b>"; | var ACADEMIC = "In choosing the academic professional, we selected our interviewees to be individuals whose opinions were expected to be bias based on their academic background. Professors in land and food systems, ethics and philosophy and microbiology who have studied genetically modified organisms were asked to participate in our professional interview. Their responses opened our eyes to factors that we had not considered previously. <b>Click to view the interview questions.</b>"; | ||
var MARKETINGPROFS = "We spoke with two marketing professors, Tim Silk and Joey Hoegg and discussed our human practices mission statement. They assisted us in considering all of the marketing aspects of our project and helped us in developing our professional interviews with various other professors. After the academic interviews, having gained some perspective about the opinions individuals may express, we sat down with two marketing professors to lay down the basics of a public questionnaire. "; | var MARKETINGPROFS = "We spoke with two marketing professors, Tim Silk and Joey Hoegg and discussed our human practices mission statement. They assisted us in considering all of the marketing aspects of our project and helped us in developing our professional interviews with various other professors. After the academic interviews, having gained some perspective about the opinions individuals may express, we sat down with two marketing professors to lay down the basics of a public questionnaire. "; | ||
| - | var DEVSURVEY = "We developed a Survey composed of three sections: General yogurt purchasing habits such as price and size and consumer use, Factors buyers consider when making yogurt purchase and What factors individuals would consider in choosing to buy a genetically modified yogurt as opposed to a non modified yogurt. <b>Click to view the survey.</b>"; | + | var DEVSURVEY = "We developed a Survey composed of three sections: General yogurt purchasing habits such as price and size and consumer use, Factors buyers consider when making yogurt purchase and What factors individuals would consider in choosing to buy a genetically modified yogurt as opposed to a non modified yogurt.Through our industry and academic interviews, we isolated five motivators to test: Health Benefit, Health Hazards, Ecological Impact, Price, and Taste.<b>Click to view the survey.</b>"; |
var ETHICSAPPROVAL = "To conduct our survey at Telus World of Science, we needed to obtain Ethic Approval from the UBC Behavioral Research Ethics Board. We submitted our application to the board, obtained approval from the Microbiology and Immunology, and with the help of Research Ethics analysts, we obtained the approval within two weeks. <b>Click to view the steps we followed to obtain our approval and the approval document.</b>"; | var ETHICSAPPROVAL = "To conduct our survey at Telus World of Science, we needed to obtain Ethic Approval from the UBC Behavioral Research Ethics Board. We submitted our application to the board, obtained approval from the Microbiology and Immunology, and with the help of Research Ethics analysts, we obtained the approval within two weeks. <b>Click to view the steps we followed to obtain our approval and the approval document.</b>"; | ||
var SCIENCEWORLD = "We decided to conduct our public survey at Telus World of Science. We met with Mila Cotic, the manager of community connections at Science World and discussed the steps required leading up to the day when we would conduct the survey."; | var SCIENCEWORLD = "We decided to conduct our public survey at Telus World of Science. We met with Mila Cotic, the manager of community connections at Science World and discussed the steps required leading up to the day when we would conduct the survey."; | ||
Revision as of 00:48, 28 September 2013
iGEM Home
Human Practices
In the human practices component of our project, we intended to learn about the professional, industrial and public perception of Genetically Modified Organisms and aim construct a marketing strategy for a Genetically Modified Yogurt. This particular approach was chosen for our project due to the consumer-based nature of our final product. First to obtain a general knowledge about the common perspectives with regards to GMOs, we will survey various professionals, people from the industry and citizens in public places. To focus and direct this survey towards our project involving a genetically modified yogurt, we will first survey various people in the dairy industry to understand the major struggles and concerns when dealing with GMOs in this industry. We will then design a survey according to the results obtained from the industry that addresses the concerns that have been raised. The professionals targeted by out survey will include professors with backgrounds in philosophy, bioethics, biology, microbiology, genetics, engineering, land and food systems, and several other fields that are not involved with or study the issue of genetic modification. We will also conduct surveys in public to better our understanding about the major concerns citizens may have with regards to consuming Genetically modify foods, and in our case, yogurt. We then began to consider human practices concerns surrounding CRISPR bacterial immunity. Due to recent discoveries with regards to the CRISPR system and scientific advances made in this field, we concluded that creating a Spacer Repository would be of benefit in assessing the potential unintended implications of these sequences. We developed a submission sample and included the information that would be necessary in the repository.
Genetically Modified Yogurt
Roll over parts of the flow chart to read more!
CRISPR Space-R
The CRISPR system gains it's specificity through RNA transcribed from highly variable spacer regions that are separated by conserved repeat regions. The resulting small RNAs are used to target phage DNA and confer immunity to the bacterial host. While one of the most useful feature of CRISPR is it's easily engineered specificity, spacer regions could potentially have "off target" activity and unintended implications. We are currently in the process of building a repository for CRISPR spacer sequences for the iGEM community. Our server will host the sequences and a BLAST-pipeline that will retrieve all the possible sequences from public databases that could be targeted by the submitted spacer. Once a spacer sequence is submitted and BLAST-results are generated, a review process will take place where two anonymous iGEM teams submit a safety assessment. This will include possible societal, environmental and scientific implications of the spacer region as they relate to the possible target sequences. Moreover, this could help seed new ideas and applications with the newly designed spacers. Here is an example of a submission form for Space-R:
