Team:ECUST China/Attributions
Thanks to all the 18 team members for their effort and contribution to our whole project. Thanks to our 6 enthusiastic and patient instructors who give us significant instructions during the whole project. Thanks to all the relative professors and senior schoolmates who give us advice for our project design and help us tackle with problems during the experiment. Thanks to our sponsors who give us useful database and long-term vision guidance. Thanks to everyone who care about ECUST_China! We are grateful to all the staff in East China University of Science and Technology, without whose support, Magic Blue cannot move forward nor complete.
LuYuqing, acted as the group leader of 2021 ECUST_China. Responsible for focusing on the schedule of all the events and participating and coordinating tasks among groups.
Liu Yihan is the leader of the experiment group. She participated in the experiment’s design and responsible for lab operation.
Li Wenhao is a member of the experimental team and participated in most of the experiments.
Qian Chen is good at finding data and problems. Besides the basic experiment, he was responsible for docking with Wiki group and modeling group and finding the data required for the experiment.
Yin Wutong participated in the promotion of the experiment, the production of the plasmid, and the design of the webpage layout.
Gong Xuan took part in the initial design of the style of website in wiki group. She was also responsible for part of design of plasmids and participated in experiment in experiment group.
Zhang Boya acted as the leader of wiki group who had the experience of painting study and designed many graphics for the wiki. Also she assisted Qin Peng to complete the construction of the web page and finally organized and uploaded all the contents required by the wiki.
Gu Pengyi likes painting. She draws some graphics for our wiki and she is responsible for reviewing and typesetting the text content on the web page.
Qin Peng who majors in computer is responsible for writing code and building web pages. He is also committed to uploading our web content.
Sun Huiming who majors in art and design helps us design and draw pictures and make animation videos.
In 2021, ECUST igemers co-wrote all the contents of the wiki page.
Liu Lijuan,acted as the leader of modeling team, she arranged missions and built several models for the Magic Blue program.She led the fermentation plant model andestablished the overall work of the modeling group.
Lu Jixia is responsible for fermentation plant programming,aimed at developing algorithms to achieve brief input/output operations.
Xu Yanjie does well in literature retrieval and assisted us to build the kinetic model of fermentation.
Wang Xiaotao, constructed the metabolic network model, analyzed the changes of metabolic flow, and provided suggestions for other models.
Ye Ting, acted as the leader of human practice team, she arranged the tasks of human practice. She was responsible for promotion vedio and in charge of managing our social media. She also visited some merchants and communities to investigate food safety to further optimize our project.
Wang Xiyi, mainly investigated the current siuation of phycocyanin. She conducted questionnaires and collated the information. She also participated in the 23rd twenty Natural Raw Materials and Food Ingredients China Exhibition to collect public opinions which results has been influencing the orientation of our project.
Guo Ruiyang, arranged popular science publicity work. She planned the teaching activities ranging from primary to junior schools which distributed in various parts of the country in August for the popularization of synthetic biology and our project.
Li Menghua, the principal director of Conference of China iGEMer Community, and she was responsible for visiting Zhejiang Binmei Biotechnology Company.
They altogether contacted different companies and communicated with other teams.
Also we would like to thank the institute of Bioengineering in East China University of Science and Technology for their supports and help.
After the brainstorm among the primary members for 2 month, we take Magic Blue as our final project. Initially we can not find a best solution to tackle with the heat sensitive property of phycocyanin and the high cost in the productive process at the same time. Finally we decide to use the gene fragment from a kind of heat-resistant cyanobacteria to process phycocyanin and through the application of site-directed mutagenesis technology we are capable to produce a kind of phycocyanin with super heat resistant property. Also we select yeast as the host to produce phycocyanin because yeast is a widely used modified model organism which can be easily used to expand the scale of production through fermentation and has distinct advantages over traditional form of directly extraction. We are also suggested to use CAD to build the factory model, testing the feasibility of our ideal as a kind of proof of concept.
Pro. Wang Qiyao: Use CAD to really construct a 3D model and learn more systematic knowledge of synthetic biology.
We asked professor Wang Qiyao for advice about our ideas. After in-depth discussion, he suggested that since we have detailed database through the fermentation experiment we can use our detailed databases to construct a factory design through CAD which can greatly push our project forward. Having the factory 3D model, we may someday really make our project come true.
In addition professor Wang Qiyao also suggested us to systematically learn the knowledge of synthetic biology like understand how to design a biology gene component or system to test the regular of genosome which inspire us design the project and understand the project deeper.
Pro. Xie Jingli : Site-directed mutagenesis technology can be used to help the construction of heat-resistant products and take care of the safety of the foods.
To verify that our idea is theoretically feasible and meaningful, we consulted professor Xie Jingli, who is well versed in food engineering. And she approved us of our idea about using yeast as our host to produce phycocyain because it can be easily used to expand the production field and just using algae to expand the production field may counter with the high cost of photo-fermentation cylinder in fermentation or possible threat from the bacteria in the farm environment.
Also she suggested us to use site-directed mutagenesis technology to specifically improve the heat-resistant property of phycocyanin and we should put more attention on the food safety in our project.
This set us thinking more deeply about how can we enhance phycocyanin’s heat resistant property. And we know that usually the improve of the heat resistant property accompanies with the decrease of catalyzing velocity, so we have to take more insight into the site-directed mutagenesis method. What’s more , the edibility of the phycocyanin is vital importance. Using synthetic biology to construct the metabolic pathway on the yeast, we should take care whether the source of the gene and the host are all edible and is proved by FDA or GRAS.
Pro. Gao Shuhong：We should simplify some complex and useless model directions and more tightly combine our experiment with model.
After set up several models for modeling, we consult our professor Gao Shuhong for her advice. She thought that having 6 models on the direction of factory production, stability in baking process, machine learning of black box model, grey box model, CAD factory model and molecular mechanism model of micro reaction is too complex and time consuming. Under her guidance, we cut and added some models to make the work of model really combined with experiment and push the work of experiment forward.
Pro. Li Youyuan: Whether the design of dual-plasmid system is feasible and can work well so the metabolic pathway can be build on yeast to produce phycocyanin.
Professor confirmed our idea that yeast can be converted into dual-plasmids and express well. And he also reminded us that heme catalyzed bu HO1 is a space limiting step, we should prepare multiple methods to tackle with the problem if the plasmids we use at present can’t work well to turn yeast to blue and how can we modify and redesign our plasimids to deal with the problem.
Pro. Fan Jianhua：In the selection of gene components and optimization system, how to give expression to heat resistance, stability, accurate and controllable expression? They should all be reflected in the language and pictures in the experimental design!
To verify that our idea is theoretically feasible, we also consulted professor Fan Jianhua , who is well versed in molecular biology and is an expert in algae. He suggest that our gene source should come from hot-spring heat source algae to ensure that our phycocyanin is heat-resistant. What’s more, considering the expression of phycocyanin , we should think more on the regulation of the gene fragments to regulate protein expression based on time or space.
Thanks to the experiment fields and equipment provided by Prof. Wang Qiyao.
Thanks to Prof. Xie Jingli for explained to us a lot of expertise on food safety and helped us solve the problem on how to further improve the heat-resistant property.
Thanks to Pro. Wang Qiyao, Fan Jianhua, Gao Shuhong, Li Youyuan ,Li Pengfei and Wu Hui for their guidance and patience during weekly sessions.
Thanks to Ding Haoyuan and Liu Qi who is our senior experienced schoolmates for their careful and delicate guidance on the design of the experiment and on the many obstacles we face during experiment. When we were faced with trouble, Liu Qi helped us refine the genetic circuits and biobricks, and he shared us principles on plasmid construction. When we faced problems with the operation of the laboratory apparatus and the experiment methods and procedures, Ding Haoyuan helped us a lot on how to tackle with the apparatus and do the experiment. Without them we can not carry out our experiment fluently.
Thanks to all the members dedicated to collaboration and got in touch with each other to seek for chances of making our synthetic community stronger.
We express our sincere thanks to all the team members participated in social engagement, who had been continuously contacting with related companies and professors promoting our project conceptions. We would also like to thank all these institutes along with their warm-hearted staff, who tried their best to reach a hand and inspired us with their accurate knowledge on their specialties. We would like to thank BINMEI Biotechnology company and its technical consultant Mr. Zhang Bing, who give us opportunity to visit their company and discuss our project and give us relative references and long-term develop insights. We would also like to thank all the support teaching locations who give us opportunities to spread our idea of synthetic biology and our project.
Thanks to Chengde Anjing E-Commerce Co., Ltd. for sponsoring our team uniforms.
Thanks to GenScript for their help to sythesis our gene fragment and give some instruments on plasmids construction.
Thanks to BINMEI Biotechnology company for their database support to our project.
We would also like to express our thanks to the Bioengineering Department of East China University of Science and Technology for the abundant resources and generous funding.
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IGEM_ECUST@outlook.com
ID:IGEM_ECUST
ECUST_China
East China University of Science and Technology
Shanghai,China
