Team:XHD-Wuhan-B-China/Implementation
Implementation
3D Genome Research
Bacterial population often display heterogeneity, which means different individuals are always distributed in different stages of a life cycle. This property is impeding the development of bacterial 3D genome research because the three-dimensional structure changes at different stages of life, since we can’t extract genome form a single bacterial cell, there are often too much noises in a group of cells to disrupt the result. Therefore, controlling bacterial cell division and stop cell cycle in a certain stage will highly facilitate bacterial 3D genome research.
Fermentation
At early stages of fermentation, we need strains to grow as fast as possible to reduce the time cost. However, at late stages of fermentation we may need cells to stop reproduction and focus on the accumulation of product molecules, where we can convert the growth mode from adding cell numbers to adding cell volume through light. Furthermore, our technology can also be used to coordinate cell growth when several strains are co-cultured in the same culture.
New Biosafety Switch
Many iGEM teams add suicide function to their projects to prevent contamination of the environment. These methods include: Oxygen induced, temperature induced or chemical induced suicide. We found that our project suits the theme of safety perfectly because light is abundant in natural environment and we are using light to prevent cell division, leaves our engineered strains no offspring without lab control. Although all livings evolve to adapt and survive, we can still reduce the risk of contaminating the environment as much as possible.
Future Perspective
From the result of our survey, the general public hopes for a cancer therapy from optogenetics the most. Unfortunately, it is too controversial to test gene therapies on human. We can see optogenetics as a promising future perspective of cancer therapy.
