✦ Integrated Human Practices ✦

Team NJMU-China has interviewed many parents who have a child with ASD in the previous two years as its members kept on exploring the therapeutic and diagnostic approaches to the disorder. This year, we got our inspiration from revisits to the parents we had been following throughout the years. This is because we learned from our conversations that they have spent quite a lot of money on supplements for their children. Some families were having a more challenging time during lockdown due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Therefore, we designed a questionnaire to learn more about the financial burdens of the families.

Star of the Sea is a rehabilitation center for children with ASD. This year, we collaborated with this institution and spent a total of three weeks there as volunteers. During this period, which was also our first week there, we interviewed the staff, talked to the parents, and helped out in classes for the children. We were surprised again at how common supplements are for autistic children. By looking more closely at the most frequently used supplements, we decided upon a few substances that we wanted our engineered bacteria to produce.

Our chats with parents of autistic children and staff at the institution

In the meantime, we held weekly seminars and discussions to share the literature we had read through in the past week and look deeper at the severity of ASD. Experiences at Star of the Sea were also shared during our discussion so that everyone could get a chance to hear the stories of autistic children and those who love them.

During this period, we kept on organizing weekly discussions and sharing literature in our WeChat group chat. These meetings allowed us to brainstorm ideas and plan for future activities. Our team members would also make a short presentation of one or two articles that they found helpful to our project. One specific article about a quasi-paired cohort study on ASD drew our attention. After a thorough discussion, we decided to focus on mitochondrial dysfunction, which is commonly present among autistic children and is vital for the pathogenesis of ASD.

Children learning the structure of different genetic materials

After shifting our attention to mitochondrial dysfunction in children with ASD, we attended an online conference where academics shared their findings about mitochondria. We indeed benefitted a lot from the lectures.

Our team attending the conference on mitochondria

Another conference that was important to us was held by Wiley Neuroscience, where experts in the field of ASD shared their new findings with researchers and family members of autistic people. Our PI, Professor Xingyin Liu, also participated in the conference and lectured on the relation between the microbiota-gut-brain axis and the development of ASD. We learned more about the therapeutic approaches to ASD from the forum, which helped us design our project better.

Xinyuan Wang delivering the lecture on laboratory safety

Besides, we handed out more questionnaires to parents to take a closer look at their mental state so that our project could be better directed. We also hoped that with our analysis, all the team members and anyone who wants to reach out to children with ASD could know the severity of the problem more clearly.

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When we set out to design our project, our team members encountered more troubles as we got down to the specifics. Therefore, we decided to seek support from the outside by contacting professionals in this field. Professor Yichao Wang is the deputy chief physician of Hunan Maternal and Child Health Hospital and was able to inform our team on the mechanism of the symptoms of ASD. He also offered some suggestions on detecting NAD+ insufficiency and controlling metallothionein (MT).

Opinions from other iGEM teams also meant a lot to us. We kept participating in collaboration with the iGEM community and posted updates about our shared work and meetings on social media platforms. On June 4th, we joined NJU-China, Nanjing-China, NJTech- China, NAU-China, and CPU-China at the NIA (Nanjing iGEM Association) discussion session. Each team had the chance to present their project before taking up questions from other iGEMers. Team NJU-China asked us about the prevalence of mitochondrial dysfunction among autistic children based on their understanding of ASD. Following a discussion on the pathogenesis of the disorder, we decided to dig deeper into literature and up-to-date statistics to better understand mitochondria's role in the development of ASD.

NIA meeting-up

Additionally, we benefitted from every one of our meetings with iGEM WHU-China, the team we partnered with this year. Team WHU-China wanted to know how we would engineer our bacteria to improve mitochondrial function. Their team leader, Boshuo Zhou, also offered some advice on the design of our testing strip and the diagnosis of mitochondrial dysfunction.

Meetings with iGEM WHU-China

There has been increasing emphasis worldwide on making better practical use of fundamental scientific research from academia. As an iGEM team, we wanted to be part of the change to create something meaningful as applied scientific researchers by taking a specific question and trying our best to find a valid and comprehensive answer. Our efforts in entrepreneurship entailed the following two aspects: the translation of our project, and the starting up of an online biotechnology company. Each of them went from preparation to evaluation and further planning.

At the preparation stage, we organized a discussion on biosafety and related ethics with iGEM Nanjing_NFLS. We talked about the regulations and rules about biosafety both in our country and our city of Nanjing, reminding each other of the points that we missed before. Additionally, we had a simulated debate on synthetic biological products. Determining whether products of synthetic biology are life or machines helped us have a better understanding of ethics as we tried to launch our project. It was interesting to learn about the different perspectives of high school students and university students and we were able to learn from one another in the discussion.

Discussion on biosafety with iGEM Nanjing_NFLS

Since we had not participated in entrepreneurship activities ourselves, we made it a routine to take turns explaining related laws and regulations. This was an efficient way of educating every team member on the rules that we were supposed to follow. We also had open discussions on the possible aspects we could look at. Gradually, we were able to develop an overview statement containing clear and reasonable information about our product.

Our discussion on related regulations

Besides, we interviewed a biotechnology company, Xbiome, and developed our business plan with their help. The content of the interview and our business plan are available in the Entrepreneurship section.

Each team member learned a lot about the industry and was better informed of commercialization procedures. Team NJMU-China is, and will be dedicated to further developing our capsule and testing strip and helping more patients with ASD.