Overview

Parts

Biology is different from other engineering fields due to a lack of modular nature of the structure and function, which means the expression of gene will change when transferred from one species to another. What synthetic biology is dedicated to is the modularization and standardization of functional gene, to make the expression of it predictable in different chassis organism. Our project has registered 19 basic parts and 56 composite parts, all qualified for standardized requirement of RFC[10]. We have also tested these parts. We hope that everyone can utilize our parts based on our research through registry and that the information for parts can further be completed so that more people can make use of them.

Parts collection

Natural plant pigments have the advantages of high safety, having natural color and most of them have pharmacological action while most synthetic pigments have been proved to be harmful. Our collection provides essential parts to synthesize and decolorizate the plant pigments of three-primary colours. This parts collection allows us get most colors by adjusting the proportion of three-primary colours and fade them.

Engineering

We want to build an enzyme system that can produce pigments and degrade them according to our needs. For the same idea, we need the second type of enzyme system to produce short peptides for perm, and it can also degrade short peptides at any time. In order to achieve the goal, we designed multiple devices and four systems. In the stage of pathway construction, we tried a variety of methods, summed up the experience, learned from mistakes, and finally achieved some results. Our exploration and work this year has also provided some valuable experience for the follow-up teams.

Protocol

we have compiled a protocol by our team and a yeast handbook by collaborate with the Yeast alliance.

Results

To realize hair dyeing & perming and decoloring & straightening as designed, we use E.coli to construct all the needed plasmid and transfect them into yeast through electroporation to express target enzymes and peptides. To confirm the validity of our perming and dyeing theory and eventually, the whole project, real hair is used in lab trails, which aim to estimate its color fastness, mechanical property, etc.

Notebook

To achieve the results, we had took a lot of effort. Our experiment is from Our experiment lasted from July 9 to September 2, and we recorded most of it in notebook.