Attribution

Project Overview

Closed loop

GreatBay_SCIE comprises a group of high school students enthusiastic about synthetic biology and ready to change the world. This year, we set out to construct a cellulosome complex consisting of various cellulases, cellulase boosters, PETase, MHETase, and scaffold proteins which can be used to degrade textile waste. We use Kluyveromyces marxianus to produce the cellulases and cellulase boosters, while E.coli is used to express scaffold proteins and ferritin, which enables us to use magnets to recycle the complex, and the products of degradation are converted into a high-value fabric, modified bacterial cellulose. After visiting several individuals and companies working in related fields, we found out the severity of the problems caused by textile waste produced by fast fashion and determined to propose a suitable and sustainable approach to textile recycling. Through continuous research, experimentation, and collaboration, GreatBay_SCIE created the first generation of textile-degrading cellulosome complexes. This innovative means of textile recycling will undoubtedly play an essential role in the textile recycling industry by making fashion compatible with sustainability. We would like to express our sincere appreciation and gratitude to all the team members who contributed to our project and all the people who helped us during the process.

Team Introduction

Family photo

GreatBay_SCIE is a lovely family consisting of 23 high-school students full of passion for synthetic biology. With assistance from instructor Diol Wang and Sha Zhou, we carried out a series of experiments for 4 months based on 3-month research. During this long journey, every member has made concerted efforts to realize our project, building up an eco-friendly methodology to minimize the side effects of the fast fashion industry.

Rating Table

Every effort was evaluated and appreciated

Flora

As our administrative leader, she is the most hardworking person supporting our team both physically and emotionally. She skillfully organizes and helps with almost all of our activities, including education and modeling, and reaches out for collaboration with her incredible communication skill. Moreover, she puts in all her effort to help the experiment to such an extent that the lab feels like her second home. She is undeniably the core of our team, always keeping the spirit high and leading us to face adversities with an optimistic attitude.

Tom

Being hard-working and responsible, our experiment leader--Tom-- who stayed in the lab for almost the whole experiment season, designed, arranged, and recorded most of our experiments. Spending almost every day in the lab, he incredibly facilitated our experiment progression. Also, he has contributed inspiring ideas for hardware and has participated in HP.

Sabrina

She is our human practice leader who is extroverted and creative, generating a bunch of fantastic ideas. Logically, she reached out to an array of people and organizations, participating in almost all human practices to promote the progression of our project, enriching the project from various perspectives of people from all walks of life. With her brilliant writing skills, she documented and organized those human practices in detail. Besides, she also contributed to experiments and art design, always showing up when we need her.

Kevin

As the modeling leader of our team, he dedicated a considerable amount of time to learning and constructing the models on enzyme kinetics and metabolic pathway, even though he was an A2 student who was facing a heavy academic burden. Dominated by Kevin, both models for our team, including models of LPMO and Dcokerin-Cohesin interaction, and the two models for another team, LINK_China were successfully built. Apart from this remarkable work, he also acted as a modeling teacher to teach other members of our team and helped with experiments.

Sophia

Being the chief designer of our team, she used her superb aesthetic ability to design our cute icon, Prof. Celly, and determine the overall style for the wiki. Our adorable art leader has consistently brought surprises to us with her intriguing and delicate designs.

Tank

Our wiki leader has not only made concerted efforts to establish a fancy website, but he has also participated in modeling and experiments. He is also a busy A2 student pressured by university applications, but he still faced difficulties with an optimistic attitude.

Ariane

She is one of our art designers and an excellent photographer who is always prepared to help our team in any way she can. Thanks to her incredible skills in photography, we produce fantastic promotion videos and documentaries. Besides her hard work in making documentaries, she also actively helps with experiments. She is an indispensable member of our team who always helps us in times of need.

Jeremy

He is one of the most important gene designers in our team who actively participated in most of the design and experiments. Apart from those elaborate designs, he led us to design the hardware and contributed molecular models for modeling. Also, he has shown up in human practice activities.

Nara

She is reliable and responsible, completing all the tasks with a cautious attitude. As one of the core members of human practice, she attended most human practice activities, generated novel ideas, and offered useful advice to facilitate the progression of our human practice. Moreover, she is also a designer of our educational card game and an experienced laboratory technician.

Cindy

As another leading character of human practice, she paved the 'overall human practice path' and proactively participated in art design and experiments. Moreover, she was the dominant role that facilitated the birth of our documentaries, enabling more people to realize and express their opinions on our projects and synthetic biology. Thanks to her creativity, reliability and responsibility, we could always gain help from her in times of need.

Katie

Being our most experienced technician of yeast transformation, she has dedicated a considerable amount of time to experimenting and spent a lot of energy on human practice. Also, she has contributed to educational activities and supported us with her real actions.

Danni

With her contagious smile and superb communication ability, she played the dominant role in education, conducting a few lectures, and assisting with card game design and exhibition. Besides, she has proactively participated in experiments and human practice.

Leon

He is a reliable member who has participated in experiments, human practice, and education. With his outstanding presentation skills, a successful online lecture was conducted on a group of young pupils.

Maggie

She is also a brilliant painter who contributed a considerable amount of illustrations and helped with experiments. Gratefully, she reached out and offered instant assistance when we faced device difficulties.

Picso

He is a talented and distinguished musician in our team, compiling ear-catching songs for our promotion video and documentary series. Also, he is a responsible person who has finished tasks of high quality and makes contributions to implementation, human practice and education.

Samuel

He is a reliable and warmhearted teammate who is proactively involved in different tasks including experiments, human practice, and education and he always gave others a hand when other people faced adversities.

Hannah

She is a natural entrepreneur who initiated the overall frame for the implementation of our project in reality and gathered a few members together to complement their planning and analysis. Additionally, she has attended human practice and experiments.

Alison

She is a knowledgeable and capable member who has offered a wide range of novel ideas. Also, she has participated in human practice, education and experiments.

Nicole

As a member from another city, she spent most of her holiday in the lab and also helped with education and human practice.

Sophie

Being an A2 student, she still spent some time helping with experiments.

Jeffrey

He was a curious student who proactively asked questions about our experiment designs and participated in the experiments.

Eric

Although Eric was inexperienced and introverted, he has made some courageous attempts in participating in our human practice and experiment.

All of the external assistance is cherished

Lab Support

Boxiang Wang

This is our secondary instructor who has conducted more than five lectures to impart knowledge of synthetic biology and lab safety to us. Organized by him, our team has conducted 30 weekly meetings throughout the whole competition season and progressively gained efficient-researching ability. Most importantly, he instructed on our experimental designs and consistently provided us with constructive suggestions, facilitating the progression of the project.

Sha Zhou

This is our beloved instructor who is experienced and offered direct support at the beginning of our project. Apart from teaching the technique of doing experiments, she also cultivated us as qualified lab technicians by guiding us to write experiment notes and process data. Also, she is the 'spiritual anchor' of our team, providing resolutions to address every single issue.

Qing Liang

She was the administrator of the lab who took care of and supported us in various aspects, including funding, debugging wiki contents, and regulating daily activities.

Jun Yu

She provides instructions on yeast experiments, especially S.cereviae-related experiments by providing and explaining the protocol to us. Also, she taught us how to design the homologous arm for CRISPR donor plasmid and the principle of gene integration.

Chunyangdi Xie

Gratefully, she proposed and helped us to establish the improvement parts of the RFP and provide instructions on daily experiments, especially protein-related experiments.

Xiangjun Deng

He was the organizer of the lab who guaranteed that we could conduct experiments smoothly and provided funding to us.

Wiki Support

Joseph Zeng

As the savior of our team's wiki, he rescued us from technical issues and rebuilt the frame of the wiki. With his superb contributions, our wiki can show such fancy effects.

Modeling Support

Honghao Su: He provided us with detailed guidance on modeling by scheduling numerous meetings to explore the mechanism of our targeted enzymes with us and helped with coding for models that we constructed.

Hardware Support

Mary Ming

She was a responsible and reliable advisor who instructed and supported us to construct our hardware.

Art support

Xiaomo Li: She has participated in the design and drawing of some graphs and illustrations.

Project Advisory Support

All of the advisors provided suggestions when we were confronted with difficulties:

Tanya Ma: Team member of GreatBay_SCIE 2020 Roger Wang: Team member of GreatBay_SCIE 2021 Connor Zhao: Team member of GreatBay_SCIE 2021 Cheng Yu: Team member of AISSU_Union 2021

Special thanks to people from all walks of life!

All interviewees: people who were willing to be involved in our interview and completed the questionnaire have helped us to learn the public attitude towards fast fashion.

Mr. Keh from the garbage disposal company: he has revealed the existing unsustainable recycling process for us.

Professor Jiangang Zhou: He assisted us in the implementation of BC and the pretreatment of textiles.

Mo&Co, a fashion brand company: They introduced us to the fashion industry and provided suggestions for our project.

Jincheng Wang: As the cofounder of Shandong Chuangxinyi Renewable Resources Co.Ltd: He introduced us to the industry of textile recycling and the problems this industry was facing.

Weiming Yao: He gave us helpful information on textile production, dyes, and PET, and offered valuable suggestions for the industrialization of our product.

Guanxing Company: They offered unique opinions on how fashion brands view sustainability.

Mr. Scott Welch from Loopt: He provided us with an insightful understanding of the textile waste created by the fashion industry chain and the current way of recycling textile waste. He also offered helpful suggestions on our project.

Miss Scarlett: As a fashion designer, she provided valuable opinions on the public and the designers' choice of materials of clothing and the underlying problems of the fashion industry.

Mr. Edwin Keh from HKRITA: He provided us with valuable information on the logic behind fast fashion and inspired us to educate the public about the problems caused by fast fashion.

Dr. Alex Chan from HKRITA: he helped our experiments by offering valuable suggestions on the production of cellulase and our hardware.

Miss Su from a charity organization, DaShanXiaoai: She informed us about the current situation of donated clothes in remote areas.

Project initiation & Team training

Our team was established in November 2021, before which all members learned basic biology knowledge with reference to Campbell's textbook and passed a baseline test. During the Christmas holiday, all members of our team attended a winter camp where we were taught knowledge about synthetic biology (eg. The principle of designing a gene circuit, researching skills, and using Snapgene ). Besides, we learned the rules to ensure our safety in the lab and practiced some experimental techniques.

In March, we started brainstorming. In the following 2 months, a weekly course was conducted by the instructors to further equip us with the knowledge needed and a weekly discussion was carried out to explore an array of topics and narrowed down into a social problem—Fast fashion. Eventually, we built up our project inspired by cellulosome and finalized the project proposal in the middle of May with assistance from instructors.

After finishing the project proposal, we gathered in the lab and were trained to be proficient in different experiments and started the first experiment on June 14th.

Fig.1 Presentation of the proposed ideas for iGEM in the winter camp

Fig.2 Instructor Sha Zhou was explaining the principle behind protein purification.

SUBTITLE: Difficulties

Since the production of fungal cellulases and scaffoldin proteins is an arduous and elaborate topic, we have faced several major challenges. At first, we tried to use E.coli to express cellulases and MHETase, but the expression of several cellulases and MHETase failed as they formed inclusion bodies. Later, we found the low solubility of endoglucanase (TrEGIII), MtCDH, and MHETase and the glycosylation of TaLPM and exoglucanase (CBHII) made E.coli an unsuitable host for expression due to its low secretion capacity and deficiency in glycosylating proteins. As a result, we attempted to use two types of yeast, Kluyveromyces marxianus, and Saccharomyces cerevisiae, to express cellulases, scaffolding, and MHETase. However, the expression of cellulases and scaffoldin failed in Saccharomyces cerevisiae. Also, some of our attempts to expand the available parts for Kluyveromyces marxianus were unsuccessful. We tried to use the pre-pro secretion leader (Mα) for K.lactic as the Mα for Kluyveromyces marxianus. The result was disappointing as the Mα for K.lactic failed to help protein secretion. We found the Mα for Kluyveromyces marxianus and succeeded in integrating it into the backbone of K. marxianus.