Achievement
As you might expect, this year, an intriguing project is on the horizon. No one had ever thought about using biological principles to complete perming and dyeing of hair, and even more, the chance to remove any change you make through this any time you want. Three innocent natural pigments are selected as the foundation of allocation of different hair colors. Meanwhile, we found three corresponding enzymes that could be used in decolorization. A brand new short peptide is also designed to make the hair curl. Surprisingly, with the help of DsbC, this short peptide could have exactly the reverse effect of itself, that is to say, hair straightening.
What's more, through modeling and 3D printing, operational product prototype is fabricated. A portable fermenter and a dyeing comb. The practical of them makes Mr. Tony' more Mr. Tony in the field, or, in other words, suits our project on the aspiration of industrialization.
Due to the benefit of normalized pandemic prevention and zero cases where we are now, opportunities are open to travel across the country this year for huge amounts of human practice and social education. We visited various of corporation, educational institutions, communicated with massive related field individuals, professors and teams and popularized our team prospect to people from primary school students to undergraduates, and from all over the society.
During HP, we were informed that there exists monumental requirement of safe dyes that allow decolorization from industries beyond our imagination, which makes our project more valuable and promising among industries of food process, textile, military and antiques repair.
Medals
Bronze Medal
Figure 1: Bronze Medal
Silver Medal
Figure 2: Silver Medal
Gold Medal
Figure 3: Gold Medal
2.Improvement of an Existing Part
Special Prizes
1.Best Education
We conduct educational activities for all ages, going to elementary schools, high schools and colleges, as well as publishing courses online. One of our teammates even went to support education in mountain areas. We believe through our courses, people can learn the beauty of synthetic biology, the basic knowledge of bioscience and the fun of perming and dyeing. What's more, In the future, we try to publish our courses to more people even including deaf-mute. We hope our faith of making the world a better place could be carried down from generation to generation.(For refer to Education more information)
2.Best Hardware
The hardware we designed includes the fermentation bottle and the dyeing comb. Different from traditional fermentation devices, our fermentation bottle is a smart combination of both a fermentation chamber and a storage chamber. Specially, a bio-film filter is placed between these two chambers. To stabilize the bio-film filter and reduce the collision of liquid onto it, three layers of mechanical filters is designed for packaging. Each one of them smartly connects with one another and together they make up the special filter system. Our dyeing comb is also outstanding. It is modularized so that users can change the pigments they use with ease. With our hardware, customers can easily produce pigments on their own and dye as they like. Our bottle could also serve as a portable fermentation device and can be applied to even more fermentation jobs. (For refer to Hardware for more information)
3.Best Integrated Human Practices
Aiming at truly being responsible for the world, HUST-China has built Mr. Tony's 4-Step Strategy of Human Practice.
The first is "Discover and Analyze the Problems". Through numerous interviews and questionnaires, we spotted huge health hazard underlying traditional ways of perming and dyeing.
The second is "Formulate Implementation Plan". We've kept in close communication with professors, scientists and entrepreneurs, and then combined their opinions to develop a considerate implementation plan.
For the third step, "Project Development and Assessment", while collaborating with many teams, we also organized or participated in various meetings and meetups, from which we drew much inspiration.
The last step is "Broaden the Impact". We conducted educational activities for people of all ages, launched many social welfare activities, and shared our software with open source. Momentously, we launched the "Brave Color Challenge" globally, to persuade people to cast away their prejudice and show a more beautiful self bravely. (Please refer to Human Practice for more information)
4.Best Modeling
Our modeling is separately focus on protein structure design and numerical simulation of gene pathways which excellently guides the feasibility and design of our project. Except this, deep learning algorithm derived from models realizes the predication of parameter of our products and liberation of manpower. (Please refer to Modeling for more information)
5.Best Supporting Entrepreneurship
It really took time and effort to construct such a project in the lab, and it takes more than effort to bring what we have achieved from the lab to the battle field of real-life application. Since practice is the sole criterion for testing truth, we devote ourselves to making our project more acceptable and precise to the urgent need at present. Consulting of experts from corporations of perming and dyeing and frontier staff from barber shops could filled us with confidence that our project could have various ways for popularizing, which is pretty promising. In all, training in a commercial mind instead of a research one taught us new sight from risk estimation to cost account, from hardware to profit model, from safety guarantee to device reliability... We believe our project will go way beyond iGEM competition, from which is a resourceful beginning. The world would be better because of us, even merely a little bit. (Please refer to Entrepreneurship for more information)