Overview
Thanks to the inspiration after communicating with JLU-China and NJU-China in BUCT. As an old saying goes, the obvious is only obvious when it happens to someone else. We left out some details when designing the project, but other teams provided suggestions and ideas for improvement..
Who are the proposed end users?
Our original goal is to help people who want to have healthy hair. What kind of person would be a good candidate for a genetically engineered probiotic that consumes fatty acids and produces hair growth factors? We believe that all people with sebum overproduction can use our probiotics to improve skin microecological problems and thus hair growth.
Some of the research we've done shows that most teenagers have a problem with high sebum production. 99% of people suffer from various scalp problems, so scalp health issues are very relevant to most people (relevant survey see: ). Moreover, our design can be used not only for daily scalp maintenance, but also for diseases that can cause abnormal scalp sebum secretion, such as seborrheic alopecia.
How to use our project？
Figure 1 BUCT's probiotics are applied to the scalp by adding drops of the mixture.
Our genetically engineered probiotics will be made into a freeze-dried powder, and the user will receive a serum to be mixed with the freeze-dried powder. The main components of essence are glycerin, amino acid, mannitol and urea, which are common additives in skin care products.
The serum will be packaged in 4mL packs. So users only open one at a time, which has the advantage of avoiding added preservatives and not worrying about contamination from repeated use.
We envision using it as follows:
1. Open the freeze-dried powder package, open a single serum and mix the two;
2. Apply and massage directly into the hair seam after washing and not drying, so that the probiotics and serum fully contact the scalp;
3. After 1 to 2 hours, the probiotics will start to work steadily on the scalp
Figure 2 We envision that long-term use of our genetically engineered probiotics will reduce the negative effects of excess sebum and maintain the scalp.
Security issue
In terms of security, based on the information obtained from interviews with different people, we realized that we also need to consider the following security issues:
1. Does E. coli Nissle 1917 cause harm to other organs in the human body?
2. Can engineered bacteria cause harm to other organisms when exposed to the environment?
By using the Logistic and Luedeking-Piret equations, we have succeeded in constructing a model that can predict caffeine production, and the resulting model fits the experimental data well, proving the feasibility of the model. When our E. coli Nissle 1917 goes above the level we set, it triggers the suicide program. So it can only stay up to a certain density. We have retained the detailed calculation steps. If future teams have similar requirements, they can consider referring to our calculation method. (see: )