Team:UNITN-Trento/Human Practice

We had the pleasure to entertain in our lab for one day Saverio Tommasi: a giornalist, blogger, opinionist. Saverio contacted us through facebook because he was interested in documenting the life of young scientists in Italy. He observed and filmed with great interest our work and decided to tell the story of our project and the spirit of the iGEM competition in a reportage which will be released soon on the blog fanpage.it. We explained to Saverio the importance of Synthetic Biology and scientific research in general and we hope that this video will help people to approach the beautiful world of science.

After we got the idea of a B. fruity vending machine, we wanted to verify the opinion of local people on our concept.

We proposed a five-questions survey to fruit consumers in the local market.

1. What do you think about a vending machine selling fruit? Could it be useful to consume more fruit?
2. Do you agree on using 2 molecules (Ethylene and Methyl salicylate) either to speed up or slow down fruit ripening?
3. Did you know that bananas are imported completely green and exposed to ethylene to make them ready-to-eat before they are presented on the market?
4. What if ethylene is produced by harmless bacteria that do not come in contact with fruit: would you still eat fruit exposed to ethylene?
5. Do you think that bacterial ethylene somehow differs from the plant ethylene or the chemically synthesized one?

Then, one Thursday of August the team went downtown at the city market. There we tested the knowledge level of the community on fruit ripening and asked if they thought that a fruit vending machine might be useful.

From the main cathedral square, we covered the whole market area and crossed all the city-center streets, back and forth!

Also an online form was prepared (powered by GoogleDrive Forms) to obtain more results in a more standard way.

Here are the results of our analysis.

1. What do you think about a vending machine selling fruit? Could it be useful to consume more fruit?

The first question had generally favorable results indicating the good impact of our vending machine on the surveyed sample.

2. Do you agree on using 2 molecules (Ethylene and Methyl salicylate) either to speed up or slow down fruit ripening?

Difference between answers is very small, it seems that the surveyed people might as well do or do not agree with the ethylene/MeSA fruit treatment.

3. Did you know that bananas are imported completely green and exposed to ethylene to make them ready-to-eat before they are presented on the market?

The answers difference is very small in this question too. It seems that presence or absence of prior knowledge in regards of bananas ethylene treatment are equally probable.

4. What if ethylene is produced by harmless bacteria that do not come in contact with fruit: would you still eat fruit exposed to ethylene?

Surprisingly the majority of the tested people agree with the use of ethylene producing bacteria to treat fruit.

5. Do you think that bacterial ethylene somehow differs from the plant ethylene or the chemically synthesized one?

From the answers it seems that tested people might equally distribute between those that give a correct answer, a wrong answer or that do not have any opinion on the subject. The last two groups are characterized by a lack of prior knowledge on the subject.

1. What do you think about a vending machine selling fruit? Could it be useful to consume more fruit?

Results of the online survey is similar to the market survey as far as the first question is concerned.

2. Do you agree on using 2 molecules (Ethylene and Methyl salicylate) either to speed up or slow down fruit ripening?

It seems that the use of molecules to control fruit ripening would be accepted by the majority of the tested people. Nearly fifty percent of the sample worked or studied on this field, so it should not be interfering, but we cannot strongly affirm this.

3. Did you know that bananas are imported completely green and exposed to ethylene to make them ready-to-eat before they are presented on the market?

Tested people might as well do or do not know that bananas are treated with ethylene.

4. What if ethylene is produced by harmless bacteria that do not come in contact with fruit: would you still eat fruit exposed to ethylene?

Surprisingly the majority of the tested sample agreed with the usage of ethylene producing bacteria to treat fruit.

5. Do you think that bacterial ethylene somehow differs from the plant ethylene or the chemically synthesized one?

From the response we deduced the tested people have the knowledge required to give a correct answer to this question.

We planned to perform a statistical analysis of the data, to infer the relationships between the answers and different categories like age, instruction, gender,... but then we realized that both samples, ‘market’ and ‘online’, are not representative of the population that we wanted to analyze (italian population). Also the size of the sample is not high enough: 102 from the market and 172 from the online survey.

In conclusion, from our survey it seems that the idea of a vending machine with ready-to-eat fruit treated with bacteria-derived ethylene should have a great feedback when presented on the market!