PART1: Inflammatory Bowel Diseases
At the beginning, our team was lost in the sea of ideas for the upcoming competition.
With burnt brains, we headed out for dinner and dodged ourselves into the flood of traffics of Downtown Nanjing.
While we were about to loosen our mind and call it a day, walking by Zifeng Tower,
one of our teammates recalled that this skyscraper shooting right
through the clouds was illuminated by gorgeous purple lights in a day of 2020.
Nanjing, source from World IBD Day website.
“Is it a special day or something?” Questioned Qi.
It suddenly came to us that this fascinating coloration was not a coincidence,
as our team members from all over the country: Hangzhou, Suzhou, and Taihu
all recorded the landmark architectures being covered in the exact same color.
We were astonished by the combination of wonderful coloring and highness of the genius architecture,
which creates a scenery that could only be found in the most beautiful dreams.
Left: Suzhou, source from World IBD Day website; Right: Huzhou,source from World IBD Day website.
Later we learned that the simultaneous display of purple lights is a display designed for world IBD day,
which was established among over 50 countries all over the world
by the European Federation of Crohn's & Ulcerative Colitis Associations (EFCCA)
during the Digestive Disease Week in the US, 2010.
This color is the color of the purple silk ribbons, which symbolize the awareness and support for IBD patients.
Source from World IBD Day website.
IBD is the abbreviation of Inflammatory bowel diseases (including Crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis),
which are two chronic diseases of the gastrointestinal tract
that causes diarrhea, fatigue, abdominal pain and cramping, blood in the stool,
reduced appetite, and unintended weight loss.
According to past records, over 1 million residents in the USA and 2.5 million in Europe are estimated to have IBD,
with substantial costs for diagnosis and treatment.
However, in the past few decades, newly industrialized countries in Asia, South America,
and the Middle East have documented the emergence of IBD, with a considerably higher growth rate.
As a recent study calculates, China would have over 1.5 million cases of IBD by 2025.
Despite the huge incident of the disease, its pathogenesis remains undiscovered,
and there’s not enough public awareness for the chronic pain that IBD patients have to withstand day after day.
Source from World IBD Day website.
Fortunately, the situation is improving for IBD patients.
While more and more countries, cities, and people join the fight against the disease,
and more landmarks are being ignited with purple neon lights on the 19th of May
and more IBD patient associations are being established, more social activities are being organized,
the information about IBD is spreading rapidly among the crowd.
As for Chinese IBD society, the Chinese IBD month was established
by the IBD Committee of Chinese Society of Gastroenterology (CSG)
and China Crohn’s and Colitis Foundation (CCCF) to raise public attention to the disease
and the life quality of IBD patients.
Through web seminars, purple-landmark display, sharing stories, and holding “living exclusively on liquid food challenge”.
After learning more about this disease and gathering information about the patient populations on public websites,
we recognized that IBD has its universality among the crowds
and that it is a problem to be solved not only for China but also in other parts of the world.
PART2: Inflammatory Bowel Diseases & polyphosphate
One of our teammates, who was a member of Prof. Wenjie Guo’s laboratory,
mentioned that although current IBD therapies have obvious drawbacks,
the experiments conducted in his lab accidentally found
that polyphosphate had curative effect for inflammatory bowel diseases.
Prof. Guo is an expert of bowel diseases.
According to his previous studies, he discovered
that long-chain polyphosphate is promising to cure inflammatory bowel disease.
PART3: Polyphosphate(PolyP)
Polyphosphate can be abbreviated as polyP.
According to existing researches, long-chain polyP are involved in biological processes
such as regulation of gene expression and DNA uptake in microorganisms,
and in biological processes such as mitochondrial metabolism, cell calcification
and blood coagulation in mammals. Long-chain polyP is an indispensable energy source in organism,
including soluble and insoluble classifications.
However, during our following investigation,
we discovered that long-chain polyP is difficult to synthesize.
Chemically synthesized polyP are short chain, unstable in nature,
and the production process is not environmentally friendly.
Producing polyP by chemical methods is difficult and has many problems.
For example, it needs high temperature and high pressure, it needs high consumer and high cost,
it also produces lots of byproducts. Therefore, a method of biosynthesis of long-chain polyP is urgently needed.
PART4: How to Carry Out
PolyP kinase (PPK) in bacteria can catalyze the synthesis of polyP with the phosphate group in ATP.
In our project, we aim to insert a ppk gene into the plasmid,
which codes the PPK protein, then transform the plasmid into bacteria.
With the genetically modified bacteria, we hope to biosynthesize long-chain polyP,
which is biocompatible and promising to cure IBD.
The aim of our project is to develop a new application of long-chain polyP,
including not only biosynthesizing it with high yield and under the concept of sustainable development,
but also exploring its potential to be developed as a new IBD therapy.