Team:XHD-Wuhan-Pro-China/Engineering
Engineering
The Initial Design-The Production Module
Initially, when our team analyzed the problem of alcohol poisoning and enzyme dysfunction。 we found that the digestion of alcohol is controlled by two major enzymes, ADH and ALDH. ADH converts alcohol to acetaldehyde, and ALDH converts acetaldehyde to acetic acid. A malfunction of any of these two enzymes could result in toxic substances building up in our body. However, 2 major gene mutations in the east Asian body enhances the function of ADH and weakens the power of ALDH. As a result, the toxic acetaldehyde easily builds up in east Asian’s bodies when they drink alcohol. Such phenomenon is so called “the alcohol blushing syndrome” as the acetaldehyde makes your face turn red. Therefore, while constructing our plasmid, we first inserted the genes for these two enzymes, adh and aldh gene, making up the production module of our final design.
Improvements Made-The Acceleration Module
After we came up with the initial design, we were fortunate enough to have the chance to meet professor Ma, a professor at Huazhong Agriculture University. After listening to our plan, he first showed interest in the project, and then pointed out a few potential problems in it. Within these questions, one of them showed that in the alcohol metabolism process, NADH is converted to NAD+, which disrupts the energy balance in the cell bodies.
After identifying the problem, we tested the actual situation in experimental settings. In our experiments, we found out that the unbalance of NADH and NAD+ does significantly limit the rate of metabolism process. To solve the issue, we also inserted NADE and NOX genes from E.coli k12 and Lactobacillus brevis to overcome the energy unbalance for speeding up the reactions as well as promoting the efficiency of the enzymes. This forms our energy module or acceleration module.
After inserting the acceleration module to create plasmid PSB-AN, we went through a series of experiments to test if the module had increased the efficiency of alcohol digestion. Results of the trials shown that both PSB-AA and PSB-AN had effectively decreased the alcohol concentration in experimental settings, with the improved module enhancing the digestive abilities of the enzymes.
With these two parts combined together, alcohol in the body can be converted to harmless acetic acid efficiently and safely.
Last part
Unfortunately, as a group of high school students, math is a little bit difficult for us, and we need more time to research and study. At this time, we are not able to publish the results.
In this way, we will continue to work hard, and strive to show the results of the digital simulation at the time of the final defense.