Team:WHU-China/Attributions
Overview
Due to the previous epidemic, our laboratory experience is not very rich, and some of our practical activities this year are carried out online, but we’ve tried our best as we can and hope it can inspire the iGEMers in the future. We started coming up with ideas about what we would like to do during January, mainly through online meetings. From April to September, we all engaged ourselves in the designing and lab work, trying our best to obtain as many results as possible.
Many iGEMers, professors and teachers have been supporting us along the way, We are grateful to all the people and institutions that provide help to us sincerely. All the work done by our team members and the help received from others is shown below.
What We Accomplished
By brainstorm and looking through literature, we have finally made our project “Acneraser”! We have designed a system containing four modules — Sebum Removal Module, Inhibition Module, Fatty Acids Sensing Module and Safety Module. With four aspects integrated together, we envision "Acneraser" will become a novel and efficient therapy for acne. Besides putting forward the idea, we made a lot of efforts in other aspects to realize our project, including building the hardware, modeling our system, doing human practices activities, collaborating with other teams and so on. Proudly, we make the wiki and practice our presentation all by ourselves.
Our team members’ work is listed below:
Liran Mao-- coordinates the affairs of the whole team and participates in the design of the experimental part. Leads the experiment of directed evolution. Links the experimental group with the mathematical model group and establishes the flux accelerator model. Participates in and supervises the work of human practice group, commercial group and art group.
Chaodong Zhang-- responsible for the improvement of bacterial fatty acid decomposition ability, looks through literatures and finds data of FadD and FadE. Designs and conducts the experiments. Participates in the work of human practices and real-word application partially , connects with our PIs, purchases experimental reagents and so on.
Guokai Wang-- The first one to come up with the design of using dual purpose engineering bacteria to treat acne and contributes to the further development of the design. Responsible for the experiments about using PctA to inhibit the growth of P. acnes. Participates in human practices activities.
Can Xu-- manages the whole wet lab work, including connecting all team’s experiments and providing assistance for other modules. Responsible for the design and experiments of constructing gene defect type. Looks through literatures and contacts laboratories of other universities or research institutions for assistance. Participates in the work of human practices.
Keyu Lu-- Responsible for human practice and communicates with some other teams to make a better communication. Participate in wet lab and works on the directed evolution part.
Yuxuan Yang-- responsible for Real-world Application. Contacts and organizes biological medicine company enterprise meeting, middle school information session. Participates in the experiments of the bacteriocin.
Ruoyu Shen--Participates in the experiments of the Decomposition of Fatty Acids. Responsible for all the art design work, including our team logo, promotion video, poster, wiki and so on. Contributes to the human practices work.
Xu Yan--responsible for the growth simulator model, assists in completing other models and so on.
Xiaoshi Lu--provides detailed modeling ideas as well as programming support for models and so on.
Feiyang Yi--responsible for the basic flux accelerator model, assists in completing other models and so on.
Bing Liu--responsible for the design of website, draw the illustration in website and compose the website layout.
Yingqi Zhao-- responsible for the design, development and deployment of wiki web pages and management of related images and other files.
Yuan Zhang-- makes the wiki and responsible for the main page.
Boshuo Zhou--constructs two plasmids, and participates in constructing vectors and identifies the interested proteins PctA fused with His-tag expressed in E. coli BL21(DE3). Contributes to purifying the interested proteins and testing the inhibitory effect.
Jiaze Liu-- Participates in the work of human practice partly, participates in the work of the group of directed evolution of the wet lab partly.
Haoming Ma-- Responsible for all the hardware design. Design and build a high throughput microfluidic chip, using 3D printing to make part of the chip device.
General Support
Wuhan University provides the opportunity for us to attend iGEM. And as a comprehensive university, Wuhan University makes it possible to make our team an interdisciplinary and one. Our team members come from College of Life Sciences, Hongyi Honor College, School of Mathematics and Statistics, School of Computer Sciences, which make us an energetic and warm family.
Project Support And Advisors
PIs
Primary PI
Secondary PI
Prof. Yu Chen
Prof. Zhixiong Xie
Experts of biomedical engineering, medical sciences, synthetic biology of microorganisms and plastic surgery
Dr. Min Wang
Dr. Ding Hong
Prof. Fei Gan
Prof. Pu Chen
To improve the practicability of our project, we interviewed several experts either online or offline. From Prof. ZhiXiong Xie and Prof. Fei Gan, we learnt a lot about the design, attention list, feasibility together with where or how can we make it. From Dr. Min Wang and Dr. Ding Hong, we know much about what is the main reason of acne, how we cure it now and the benefits or shortages of these ways. Dr. Ding Hong also make suggestions for our business part, from which we know the market mechanism of ance treatment. From Prof. Pu Chen we got suggestions on how to design a microfluidic chip suitable for our project effectively. We appreciate all the information we got from these experts and a certain amount of approval they showed. You can see detailed attribution in Integrated HP.
Theory Support
Datsenko KA, Wanner BL. One-step inactivation of chromosomal genes in Escherichia coli K-12 using PCR products. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2000;97(12):6640-6645.—Provide us with protocol of gene knockout
王芃,袁盛凌,郑继平,李淑琴,段海清,张兆山.一种快速、精确构建大肠杆菌组氨酸营养缺陷型的方法[J].微生物学通报,2004(02):95-99.—Show feasibly conducted auxotroph and relevant target gene
Baba, Tomoya et al. “Construction of Escherichia coli K-12 in-frame, single-gene knockout mutants: the Keio collection.” Molecular systems biology vol. 2 (2006): 2006.0008.—Show feasibly conducted auxotroph and relevant target gene
https://cgsc.biology.yale.edu/Auxotrophs.php-- Show feasibly conducted auxotroph and relevant target gene
Packer MS, Liu DR. Methods for the directed evolution of proteins. Nat Rev Genet. 2015 Jul;16(7):379-94. doi: 10.1038/nrg3927. Epub 2015 Jun 9. PMID: 26055155.-- Guide us to design directed evolution experiments and select appropriate screening methods.
David Wilson, Tony Keefe. Random Mutagenesis by PCR(2000.3)[2021.10]. https://molbio.mgh.harvard.edu/szostakweb/protocols/pcr/mutpcr.html.-- Guide us in the design of EP-PCR.
FENG, Youjun; CRONAN, John E. Crosstalk of Escherichia coli FadR with global regulators in expression of fatty acid transport genes. PloS one, 2012, 7.9: e46275. https://2019.igem.org/Team:NTHU_Taiwan/Parts.-- Guide us to select fatty acid sensitive promoters.
Faye T, Langsrud T, Nes IF, Holo H. Biochemical and genetic characterization of propionicin T1, a new bacteriocin from Propionibacterium thoenii. Appl Environ Microbiol. 2000 Oct;66(10):4230-6. ——Provide us with the molecule to specifically inhibit the growth of Propionibacterium acnes.
Ni, Y., Chen, R. Extracellular recombinant protein production from Escherichia coli . Biotechnol Lett 31, 1661 (2009) ——help us learn about the secretion system in Escherichia coli,and judge that the propionicin T1can be theoretically secreted.
Other Advisors
Senior iGEMers Yipeng Xie, Dingchen Yu, Boxuan Xia, Kaiyu Qiu, Shichen Tang, Jingcheng Wang, Luyang Li, Wenhui Xuyang -- Give us help among all kinds of aspects of our project.
iGEMers from RDFZ-- Provide inspiration for our promotion video and allow us to use it.
China Center for Type Culture Collection-- Provide us all bacterial strains for our experiments
Fundraising Help And Advice
We appreciate the funds College of Life Sciences provides for us!
Lab Support
Schools
College of Life Science, Wuhan University --Provide us with a science training lab to conduct all the molecular biology experiment.
Teachers and Professors
Prof. Shishen Du’s Lab, College of Life Science, Wuhan University--Allow us to conduct the gene knockout part experiments in his lab and provide us enough materials and instructions.
Prof. Pu Chen's Lab, School of Basic Medicine, Wuhan Universit--Allow us to manufacture microfluidic chips in his lab and provide us instructions.
Prof. Zhixiong Xie’s lab, Prof. Chen Yu’s lab, Prof. Xiangdong Chen’s lab, Prof. Kun Wang’s lab, Prof. Haining Du’s lab, College of Life Sciences, Wuhan University--Provide several experimental materials for us when we were badly in need of them.
Teacher Yan Long--Provide us enough experimental conditions and help us solve all kinds of problems during our experiments.
Postdoctor Xingpeng Wen, Graduate students Shiyu Teng, Han Gong and Xuesi Zhu--Teach us some experimental skills and help us solve experimental problems.
Human Practices Support
Because of the severe pandemic, our human practices activities were mainly conducted with several experts from Wuhan University and a few other experts. These experts have been mentioned above. Again we sincerely appreciate Prof. Zhixiong Xie, Prof. FeiGan and Prof. Yu Chen from College of Life Science, Prof. Pu Chen from School of Basic Medical Sciences, Dr. Min Wang from Zhong Nan Hospital of Wuhan University, Dr. Ding Hong from College of Pharmacy Wuhan University for their advice which really helps us improve the availability of our project.
Organization Support
Tsingke Biotechnology-Help us in DNA synthesis, primer synthesis and DNA sequencing.
Solarbio Life Science and Beyotime - Provide us with experimental reagents.
Ailurus vec- Help us test the optimal expression strategy of protein (FadD, fatty acyl-CoA )
Snapgene - This software help us to design recombinant vectors and primers. It also help us do some alignment between sequences.
iGEMer Support
We appreciate these iGEM teams a lot because they either share new ideas with us to help our project improve or provide us experiment materials. We made good friends with these teams in 2020 iGEM competition! You can learn specific help in collaboration.
Others
Senior student Yutao Ren—Take both team and individual photos for our team.
All of our team members' families, relatives, classmates, and friends who participate in the interviews or do our questionnaires.
