Living at the beginning of the post-pandemic era, we are lucky to have relatively more resources in our iGEM season, although many things are beyond our control. We endeavored hard to strike a balance between our project schedule and the changing world. Also,we kept going forward when some of our team members got infected with COVID successively or our institution suddenly switched to online teaching in late May.
We suppose our achievements this year make sense in such an unstable context. We have done incredible things in all the parts of our project, especially in the Human Practice part. We came up with a massive plan for hybridoma technology. There are many novel designs created by us, such as unique experimental methods as well as delicate hardware. What’s more, we are taken seriously by the specialists from ACADEMIA SINICA! We end up having chances to share our project and cooperate with the top-notch scientists there!
We have met so many incredible people during this iGEM year; We reached out to so many people with our various education commitments. Best of all, we have opened so many eyes to what can be done at the interface of Immunity and Synthetic Biology. This is our most important challenge, and we are so proud of how we achieved it. Our only regret is that we didn’t have enough time to do more in the lab. However, it’s our pleasure to share our thoughts with everyone and seek opportunities to expand our work in the future!
In the following sections, we propose to proceed to a small auto-evaluation.
We compete for the following special prizes!
We divided our educational activities into Child Education, Adolescence Education, and Young Adult Education. For the part of Child Education, we have self-painted animation and a Theme Song. We hope kids can learn synthetic biology happily. Next, the Adolescence Education part consists of online lecturing and vlogs. Students can learn academically and in a way closer to life through these two activities. Finally, the Young Adult Education part includes the Podcast channel, social media posts, and sharing with undergraduates. This part aims to introduce knowledge from details of our project to laboratory animal issues to make our audience gradually understand what our entire project mainly focuses on. Our plan started from arousing kids’ interest in synthetic biology to giving students and younger adults an insight into the problems of laboratory animal reduction and our project. We tried our best to extend to the scope of the audience so that every individual can have a chance to understand synthetic biology and iGEM. Through these efforts, we hope the two issues we are concerned about can be noticed and appropriately solved. For more information please see the Education page.
We interviewed experts from various fields to re-examine our goal from the very beginning, optimized our project, and improved current situations both scientifically and socially. Our integrated Human Practice started with Problem Confirming. We interviewed facilities in the National Centre for the Replacement, Refinement & Reduction of Animals in Research in Taiwan to confirm the non-animal derived antibodies issue and how to improve current situations scientifically and socially. To deal with technical feasibility, we interviewed Prof. Jan and Prof. Chang to confirm whether our experiment design makes sense. Moreover, we discussed the creation of the microfluid system with Prof. Tung. After that, we had a meet Ph.D. Zhuang, the CEO and CTO of Leadgene Bio, to understand the current development and future perspectives of monoclonal antibodies. Fortunately, he considered our project shows promise.He then suggested we focus on the field of biomedical research and medical technology field. Therefore, we visted Prof. Chao and Prof. Li, the medical researchers, to ensure our project is potential and necessary for them. Finally, we proposed our project to the experts in laboratory animal reduction and undergraduates interested in research in this field to introduce our project and connect to the world. We reflect, readjust, and refine our project through interviews and discussions, and we firmly believe that our project can do good for the world. For more information please see the Integrated Human Practice page.
Chinese hamster ovary (CHO) cell culturing is essential in the mass production of monoclonal antibodies. To replace the staffing-consuming fed-batch culture method, we designed a bioreactor for CHO cell perfusion culturing with a cell retention microfluidic device inside. To improve the cell retention rate and avoid the problem of microchannel fouling blockage, we combined spiral microfluidic and tangential flow filtration (TFF), two of the most commonly used cell retention design. We also optimized TFF by looking deep into nature and borrowing ideas from filter-feeding animals, such as manta rays. Additionally, a countercurrent exchange design inspired by fish gill may help increase the antibody collecting rate. These bio-inspired designs may boost the bioreactor's efficiency and the public's attention to endangered creatures like giant oceanic manta rays (
Modeling always plays an essential role in experiments, and so as our project. We have developed two separate models to assist Wet Lab by utilizing MATLAB application. We built the culture and production model to optimize hybridoma cultivation best. It comprised coupled, first-order ordinary differential equations representing the concentration float of biomass in our flask. We combined all the equations and run the model for the simulation outcome to see how the culturing process goes. We also constructed the AID-expression model. In this model, we used ordinary differential equations to qualify the Tet-On system and nuclear transport of the wild AID and modified AID. With the model, we can get the concentration of expressed AID and simulate the effect of NES deletion on the AID. Summing up, both models help us predict and optimize the experiments. Their functionality truly allows us to take a big leap forward. For more information please see the Model page.
