On June 26th, 2022, we joined the online meetup held by iBowu-China to share our project overview with other teams. Our project’s innovation of using nucleic acid detection approaches to detect B. cereus gained praise from students and teachers. While inspiring others with our project design, we also received some profound questions during the meetup. For instance, we planned to use Holmes to detect the target DNA in the genome of B. cereus after lysis in our project. It is because Holmes can detect trace amounts of DNA in solution with high efficiency and rapid detection. A teacher in the meetup asked whether we considered another efficient nucleic acid detection system. Although we did not find a more suitable system at that time, we found it afterward.
Fig. Right logos of the teams that joined the meetup, Fig. Left The timetable of the online meetup
In September, we found a just discovered enzyme called the LwaCas13a variant which enhanced collateral activity by engineering LwaCas13a and can be used for ultrasensitive detection of nucleic acids. The advantage of this LwaCas13a variant system over Holmes is that it does not rely on nucleic acid extraction (Yang et al., 2022). It allows for more sensitive and rapid detection of emergent pathogens. By using this detection system in the future, the accuracy and efficiency of our detection of B. cereus may be further improved by using this detection system.
BNDS_China 2022 participated in the offline meeting organized by the iBowu team on August 20. Updated project progress was shared by more than two high school teams and more than five undergraduate teams. BNDS_China 2022 explained the mechanisms of endolysin, ATP-testing, LAMP, and Holmes system, which were some of the main theories that supported the project establishment this year, shared the experimental results of ATP concentration detection, protein expression, CV induction system, and so on, analyzed the potential reasons of experiment failure and improvements. A closer connection between different teams could also be strengthened since BNDS_China 2022 was willing to provide help for the team who could loan out some equipment.
We donated two plasmids in the iGEM 2016 distribution kit to Team: FUDAN. These two plasmids (Part number:BBa_K118005 and BBa_K118006) carry genes coding for Crt E and B, which serve as enzymes playing key roles in the process of synthesizing β-carotene.
Also see:
Team FUDAN
We did a series of collaboration experiments with SHSBNU_China, helping them perform fermentation to synthesize naringenin delphinidin from naringenin. We successfully produced yellow delphinidin with considerable yield, helping them verify the feasibility of their new method.
We also offer them some advice about their experiment design. For example, we suggest that they could use the crystal violet induction system to replace the Lac operon since it is cheaper, more sensitive, and don’t have an unpleasant smell. We also offered several pieces of advice about their fermentation culture.
Also see:
Team shsbnu-CHINA
SHSBNU_China gave us sincere thanks, it’s our pleasure to collaborate with them.
Figure. Left The collected bacteria after fermentation Figure. Right Sample received from SHSBNU_China
