Overview

With the increasing pressure of society, people's moods tend to change erratically and people are more prone to anxiety and anger and cannot control their emotions well. And long-term anxiety and irritability can cause people's physical health to suffer. In response, we have invented a mood regulator that automatically identifies emotions and releases different substances according to them, helping users to cope positively with bad feelings. The overall device is divided into three processes: recognition, judgement and regulation.

1. Current Issues.

Changes in mood can therefore influence the acceleration of industrialisation within society, bringing with it many new problems and worries. The accumulation of such negative emotions as sadness and anxiety can also have a negative impact on physical and mental health in the long term. This trend is particularly pronounced among teenagers and young people at work and touches us deeply as a group of teenagers.

During the early March-April period of this year's competition, Jilin Province, where our team was based, was hit by a more serious new crown epidemic. The quarantine and control policy left students stranded in their dormitories and their scheduled experimental programmes could not be carried out normally, forcing all study work to be suspended or stopped. During our time in the dormitory, we noticed that the university students around us who were studying in other countries became more and more anxious and dull due to the multiple effects of the epidemic, their studies and their lives.

Many studies have shown that emotions are closely related to human physical and mental health in two ways: on the one hand, the relevant parts of the central nervous system, which manage human emotional activity, are at the same time the controllers of the activities of the body's internal organs and endocrine glands.Changes in emotions can therefore influence the activity of internal organs and endocrine glands. On the other hand, emotions can both impair and promote health, as they are often accompanied by a series of physiological changes in the organism.

2. Existing solutions and shortcomings

As it is difficult for a person to detoxify themselves when they are affected by bad moods, many products such as ambient lights, aromatherapy and essential oils have been created. However, the ambient lights, aromatherapy and essential oils currently available on the market can only release a single scent substance and achieve a single function, but not automatic identification and a combination of light, music and scent. The essential oils currently on the market are mostly chemically prepared rather than biologically made, which inevitably produces harmful substances, and their environmental friendliness and scale are difficult to guarantee.

3. Our Plan

We propose a solution that uses AI recognition together with bracelet heart rate monitoring to identify emotions, convert emotions into light signals and regulate E. coli to synthesize odour substances that can regulate emotions. An emotion regulation system combining AI intelligence and synthetic biology is constructed, with an overall division into three processes: emotion recognition and judgment, light-controlled system and odour substance release systems.

(1) Emotion Recognition and Judgement

We used AI facial recognition and heart rate monitoring system to capture the user's emotion-related facial convolution network information and heart rate information. Then we used the database for comprehensive analysis to determine the user's emotion at this time. When the emotion is judged to be sad, the system outputs a blue light signal to activate the blue light-controlled system of the engineered bacteria to synthesize the odour substance 2-PE, which can improve the sadness.

We also adhere to strict data protection regulations and user authorisation regulations during the identification process, which provide excellent protection for the privacy of our users.

(2) Blue light-controlled system

In the blue light-controlled system, we constructed the pSB1C3-stuffer-LP plasmid (BBa_K4427002). It expresses EL222 protein with the induction of L-arabinose, and under blue light, EL222 dimerize to bind to the PBlind promoter, initiating the expression of the downstream ethanol dehydrogenase (Adh1) and alpha-keto acid decarboxylase ( KdcA)，and catalyzes the synthesis of the substrate phenylpyruvate into phenylethanol (2-PE). The experimental results showed that we successfully expressed 2-PE with yields in the range of 90-100 mg/L.

(3) Odour Substance Release Systems

This system contained lights and fans . We selected the pulse width pwm (Pulse Width Modulation) way of dimming, by changing the output voltage of the proportion of empty to get different light intensity of light to meet the requirements of the experiment. For the design of the fan, we used the form of bladeless fan, with a small air supply area, so that the wind has a soft characteristic, which makes the volatile substances more conducive to blowing to the user, and soft wind carrying odor molecules will make the user more pleasant to enjoy.

Besides,we constructed a red light-responding switch using BphP1 and PpsR2. In the red light-responding switch,Ho1 catalyzes heme to BV, BV binds to BphP1 and acquires light-sensitive ability, and it can bind to PpsR2 under 760nm NIR light irradiation to inhibit the suppression of PpsR2, highly expresses downstream genes. While under 680nm red light irradiation, the suppression effect is quickly disabled and suppressed the expression of the downstream gene again. We have demonstrated the function of the red light-responding switch using green fluorescent protein (sfGFP).

In parallel, we constructed suicide systems using the function that red and blue light switches can control the gene expression of toxic proteins. When the red and blue lights are switched on simultaneously, the engineered bacteria will express toxic proteins to achieve the effect of suicide.

The success of the red light switch also suggests that we can look for more switches to expand our project, to control the synthesis of more types of odour substances and to fulfil the function of multi-emotional regulation.

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