Team:SZU-China/Achievement
Achievement
BRONZE
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1. Registered for iGEM, had a great iGEM season, and attended the Giant Jamboree.
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2. All Deliverables met!
#1 Wiki
#2 Presentation
#3 Judging Form -
3. Attributions finished!(click Attribution to see more)
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4. Project Inspiration and Description finished! (click Description to see more)
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5. Existing Part from the Registry of Standard Biological Parts has been characterized using our new approach. (Added quantitative experimental characterization data, clickBBa_K3142012, BBa_K875009 to see more)
SILVER
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1. Finished Engineering Success.(click Engineering to see more)
Validated Part - Standard Tracks finished! (click BBa_K3838111, BBa_K3838789, BBa_K3838222 to see our submitted new parts related to our project this year.) -
2. Finished Proposed Implementation. (click Implementation and to see how we would implement our project in the real world.)
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3. Finished Collaborations. (click Collaborations to see how we helped each other!)
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4. Silver Human practices finished, welcome to our Human Practices.
GOLD
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1. Integrated Human Practices: Promote our designs to the world and try to solve practical problems with our designs. (click Integrated Human Practices for more information!)
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2. Improved previous part (BBa_M36071), and click BBa_K3838888 to see the improved new part!
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3. Finished Project Modeling. (click Basic Model and Relative Abundance Analysis for more information!)
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4. Proof of Concept finished! (click Proof of Concept to see how we develop a proof of concept for our project!)
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5. Partnership finished! (click Partnership to see our partnership with and in this year)
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6. Education and Communication (click Education and Communication to see how we carry out educational activities and communications)
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7. Excellence in Another Area finished!(click Excellence in Another Area to see more)
Education and public engagement are very important to us, and we work very hard in this part.Under the premise of covering people of different ages and knowledge backgrounds, we have designed various forms of educational activities., we have designed various forms of educational activities. At the same time, we also produce an extraordinary amount of materials to support our various activities.
Students from The Affiliated High School of Shenzhen University came to our laboratory, and we gave them a lecture and safety education. This year, we created an innovative game called "Synthesize Big Protein" to educate the public about the internal logic of synthetic biology. We also organized the "Deep Blue" Charity sale with SUST-China 2021. We used the money from the sale of science popularization materials for public welfare. For college students, we gave presentations at our college. In order to make our team members and the general public more aware of synthetic Biology and iGEM competition, we opened a column on our official account, where we publish excellent interpretation of iGEM projects written by our team members every week. We also recorded a lab visit video to introduce our working environment and instruments, and published it on the public media platform.
This year's project is related to gut, so we carried out a variety of human practices to popularize knowledge about gut health and gut flora. During the Mid-Autumn Festival, we combined the traditional activity of guessing lantern riddles with our project, which was highly praised by the residents. We also went to the kindergarten and trusteeship class to teach health classes to the children of the lower age for popular science education; In addition, with the growing passion of young People for card-playing games, we designed a board game named IntestiNO that combines the rules with an intestine-health suit. In this way, people can be taught as well as entertained. The responses to the cards were so good that we contacted teams around the world to translate the cards and hopefully promote them globally.
The main target of the project is IBD, so we also made efforts to popularize the disease. We made a picture book, which explained the pathogenesis and treatment of IBD, the concept of intestinal flora and provided health advice to patients. We took it to Shenzhen Southern Medical University Hospital for free access by patients in the department of gastroenterology. Dietary habits and dietary structure are very important for intestinal health, so we made a three-folded page to provide scientific and healthy dietary advice to patients. In the course of human practice, we come into contact with patients. We stepped into their lives and listened to their voices. The patient story comes from the personal experience of an IBD patient, and we record and share it. We hope to arouse public awareness of this disease through our own efforts, attract more attention to IBD patients, and bring care and help to IBD patients.
In order to make our services fit the real needs of patients, we design and iteratively optimize a series of hardware products to achieve our personalized customized services and drug delivery measures.
We made a series of improvements based on the existing stool sampling kit, and designed a stool sampling kit suitable for long-term use by IBD patients for potential pain points such as loose stool sampling and collection devices. At the same time, in order to improve patients' medication compliance, protect patients' privacy and maintain the stability of living bacteria drugs, we chose enteric-soluble capsule encapsulated vacuum freeze-dried mushroom powder as our drug delivery method. And our products for producing protectant formula optimization, and put forward the making the idea of living bacterium microcapsule, strive to enhance the stability of living bacterium drug medication, after dissolving activity, portability and concealment, finally we will all the product on a suit, and designed for each patient's exclusive number receive tube with strong concealment of the sample, From the perspective of humanistic care for patients to fully consider.
Science literacy education for children is of great importance to the promotion of inclusiveness in the scientific community. Science education for children, especially health education, is of great importance and value.
In order to help balance the developed region and undeveloped region children scientific quality-oriented education, make the vision in children and adolescents in less developed areas, enable them to acquire more knowledge, promote the comprehensive development, we have designed many materials about intestinal health and synthetic biology,such as puzzles, card covers, badges, key chains, intestinal health picture book, card game named IntestiNO and games online which can teach them about synthethic biology.
We hope that these materials can actively pass intestinal health knowledge to children in an easy and interesting way, help them develop better scientific literacy, and effectively improve the overall educational level of the population in the region in the future, so as to feed the science and education cause in this region, and achieve the purpose of science and technology to drive economic development.
In this year's project, we will focus on two points:
1. Determine the most critical and urgent needs of IBD patients, improve their life quality, and ensure that our project design besides everything we do are meaningful.
2. Demonstrate the feasibility of the project and lift the project to a higher level.
As the core of the project, especially the patients, clinicians, and nurses, we conducted a large number of research interviews with them. After that, we fully understand the current situation of this disease worldwide, especially in China. In order to ensure the rights of patients, we drafted the patient's informed consent form and asked the patient to sign it. Since we understood the intractability of this disease and the significance of treatment, we have laid a solid foundation for experimental design.
At the same time, in order to verify the feasibility of relevant experts in synthetic biology and intestinal flora, we interviewed Mrs You Conghui, a professor of molecular biology in our school. We consulted on the feasibility of the project and experimental design and gained a lot of practical suggestions, which helped us a lot to improve our project.
In order to load our project with more practical significance, we have conducted in-depth cooperation with Shenzhen Xbiome Biotechnology Co., Ltd. And received guidance from Dr Hao Huaijie and Dr Zhang Yulong for cell experiments and animals (mouse) experiments. As the only company in China with a microbial drug production platform approved by the US FDA, we conduct research and experiment under their guidance, which helps to ensure the standardization and credibility of our products. At the same time, we communicated with Dr Huang Song, chief preparation scientist of Xbiome of drug preparations, and continuously optimized and improved our preparation plan.
In the process of the project, we realized the importance of patients themselves in our project. Therefore, we hope to turn our sight back to patients and understand their further needs. We met a Crohn's disease patient from Anhui, China and had in-depth communication with him. On this basis, we learned about the nutritional and psychological needs of IBD patients, as well as the safety and medication compliance of IBD drugs. From this, we came up with our diet management platform and online IBD patient community ideas.
In the end, we combined all the above ideas to write a business plan. In the process of writing the business plan, we consulted Will (Wang Jiang), senior manager of talent development in the Human Resources Administration Group of the Operations Department of Xbiome Company. Will gave us sufficient guidance in BP writing and told us to tell a goal with real sentiments in BP.
Finally, we hope that under the guidance of SDG, in the near future, this project can be oriented towards the world, especially the people suffering from gastrointestinal diseases in developing countries. Our health management platform will continue to be equipped with more functions, optimizing dietary guidance, psychological care and other support functions and forms, better popularize knowledge about intestinal diseases in social sciences, and call on people to pay attention to the needs of these people ...To achieve the goal of long-term stability in intestine, IBD is only our first step.
In order to implement the contents of the project and show its potential and value, we conducted a detailed market research and wrote a business plan which contains the business analysis of our project.
As responsible and visionary iGEMer, we believe that we should apply our project and its great potential to the SDGs and contribute to the future well-being of people and the planet. Therefore, based on the UN's classification and description of SDGs, we marked and singled out our project's contributions to the SDGs.
We respectively targeted SDG3.4 and SDG3.D in SDG3 Good Health and Well Being. We combined our vision into a highly integrated health management platform and are looking forward to a series of extensions in the future, especially for developing countries and newly industrialized countries.
In addition, according to the SDG4.7 goal of SDG4 Quality Education, we carried out a series of popular science knowledge activities for teenagers and children of different age groups. We also designed matching materials according to the preferences of young people and translated them into different languages in collaboration with other teams. We also combine traditional Chinese culture to promote sustainable development within the community.
Moreover, aiming at SDG10.2 in SDG10 to Reduce Inequality, we call on the society to understand IBD and care for IBD patients. And contribute to their overall health, namely "physical, psychological and social" health factors.
Finally, we made a responsible innovation contribution to SDG12.4 in the Responsible Consumption and Production goal of SDG12. We hope to follow its guidance to realize the harmless existence cycle of the waste related to the project, including designing different types of suicide switches and intestinal reference manuals for reference by subsequent iGEMer and scientific groups.
We submitted BBa_K3838233 for the best new basic part award.
Excessive reactive oxygen metabolites can aggravate the inflammatory response of IBD. Superoxide dismutase (SOD) can transform superoxide anion into H2O2, and the overexpression of SOD can significantly reduce the peroxide reaction in the inflamed colon. However, the half-life of SOD is very short, so it is impossible to achieve direct drug therapy, which requires carrier transportation.
We transformed the plasmid containing superoxide dismutase expression into the engineering bacteria, and verified its successful expression at the gene and protein levels by electrophoresis and WB respectively. Enzyme activity was measured in cell contents and medium supernatant. For intracellular superoxide dismutase, we will measure its enzyme activity-time curve and enzyme activity-temperature curve to verify it at the enzymological level.We also carried out cell interaction experiments to prove the effectiveness of this part.
We submitted BBa_K3838789 for the best new composite part award.
Antibiotic resistance genes and antibiotics are often used to maintain plasmid vectors in bacterial hosts such as E. coli. Overexpression of endogenous fabI gene and subsequent selection of triclosan in EScherichia coli have been documented as viable options for traditional antibiotic selection systems. As a functional homologue of EScherichia coli FabI, the improved VIbrio cholerae FabV can be used as a suitable marker for selection and maintenance of escherichia coli plasmid vector. Triclosan is approved by the FDA as a safe broad-spectrum antibiotic. It is widely used in household chemicals such as soap and toothpaste. By expressing the resistance gene FabV, the engineered bacteria can be resistant to trichloro production and achieve screening effect.
We constructed a composite part BBa_K3838789 to express this resistance gene. The part consists of constituent promoter, RBS, FabV and double terminator. On the part of the validation, we successfully proves the conversion of plasmid and protein expression, and reprinted in the plasmid of two kinds of bacteria DH5 alpha and nissle1917 did the concentration of the resistance screening experiment, found the right screening for concentrations of triclosan, this for the antibiotics is safe and effective engineering bacteria screening provides a great deal of reference and convenience, We consider it a great success.
This year,we created 16 new parts for our project.The parts informations are as follows:
| Part Number | Name | Type | Part Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| BBa_K3838666 | BSH | Basic | Hydrolysis binding bile salts to produce free bile hydrochloric acid and amino acids |
| BBa_K3838777 | SHSP | Basic | A stress protein, also known as a heat shock protein, gives bacteria resistance to high temperatures and low pH |
| BBa_K3838233 | SOD | Basic | Catalytic disproportionation of superoxide anion radicals to oxygen and hydrogen peroxide，which plays an important role in the balance of oxidation and antioxidation in the human body |
| BBa_K3838613 | TES4 | Basic | Thioesterase that promotes the release of butyric acid from the fatty acid synthase complexThioesterase that promotes the release of butyric acid from the fatty acid synthase complex |
| BBa_K3838567 | 6xHis Tag | Basic | A short amino acid peptide consisting of six histidine can be used as a label for affinity chromatography for protein purification |
| BBa_K3838111 | J-SHSP | Composite | A stress protein, also known as a heat shock protein, gives bacteria resistance to high temperatures and low pH |
| BBa_K3838222 | J-BSH | Composite | Hydrolysis binding bile salts to produce free bile hydrochloric acid and amino acids |
| BBa_K3838555 | J-LL37 | Composite | LL-37 is an antibacterial peptide secreted by human immune cells, which has an inhibitory effect on harmful bacteria |
| BBa_K3838888 | J-SOD | Composite | Catalytic disproportionation of superoxide anion radicals to oxygen and hydrogen peroxide，which plays an important role in the balance of oxidation and antioxidation in the human body |
| BBa_K3838999 | J-TES4 | Composite | Thioesterase that promotes the release of butyric acid from the fatty acid synthase complexThioesterase that promotes the release of butyric acid from the fatty acid synthase complex |
| BBa_K3838789 | J-FabV | Composite | By expressing FabV gene, we gave triclosan resistance to engineered bacteria and achieved non-antibiotic screening effect |
| BBa_K3838123 | YH-HSP | Composite | A stress protein, also known as a heat shock protein, gives bacteria resistance to high temperatures and low pH |
| BBa_K3838234 | YH-BSH | Composite | Hydrolysis binding bile salts to produce free bile hydrochloric acid and amino acids |
| BBa_K3838345 | YH-SOD | Composite | Catalytic disproportionation of superoxide anion radicals to oxygen and hydrogen peroxide，which plays an important role in the balance of oxidation and antioxidation in the human body |
| BBa_K3838321 | phoKiller | Composite | Allowing bacteria to sense phosphate concentrations in the environment to act on the kill switch mechanism |
| BBa_K3838654 | GluKiller | Composite | Allowing bacteria to sense glucose levels in the environment to act on the kill switch mechanism |
We would like to express our heartfelt gratitude to all the judges for your hard work! Besides, we sincerely thank everyone who gave us support!
