Judging
Our HP is not a loose activity independent of the project, but an organic whole that complements each other. All the activities of HP are related to our project design and promotion. With the discussion of team members, we decided the basic idea of HP: to further understand the background to promote the project design through HP, and use the information obtained from HP to verify the feasibility of out subject and optimize the subject design, then guide the experiment to obtain the ideal results. At the same time, public opinion is also important to us, so after the project design was perfected to a certain extent, we immediately designed questionnaires to collect social feedback. When running HP campaigns, we focus heavily on translating others' suggestions into the design of our themes, thus creating a closed loop between others' expectations and our designs, so our HP is IHP.
In the whole HP activity, every step complements each other and forms an organic whole. You can click here to see more details.
We improve the part BBa_K3868102 from the 2021 iGEM NNU-China Team.
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For low priced 2-PE, commercialization depends on lowering the feedstock cost. Thus, it requires improving the overall yield and productivity. To systematically assess the Ehrlich pathway in Y. lipolytica, we firstly deduced the stoichiometry of 2-PE biosynthesis of Ehrlich pathway with adding L-phenylalanine as the precursor. Further, we established a global metabolic model to rationally determine the potential engineering targets. As suggested by the mathematical model, experimentally enhancing pathway rigidity and ensuring the adequate precursor 2-oxoglutarate supplement coud promote the 2-PE production.
You can see all of our Model.
Through the design of the final loop, we demonstrated some of the results we hoped to get when we originally designed the project, which you can find on our Proof of Concept.
We held several meetings in the aspects of experimental design, HP and Wiki production. We have established a continuous partnership from May to October 2022 and achieved good results. We have conducted a lot of discussion and cooperation in HP design, communnication&education activity design, material preparation, etc. We jointly carried out community education, book city publicity and other activities. Because our team is composed of high school students, we are relatively weak in molecular biology technology and experimental operation. Therefore, we have extensively learned from the NNU-China team in these aspects. In particular, we both choose Yarrowia lipolytica as the chassis cell, so we learn about the culture and genetic operation technology of Yarrowia lipolytica from them. They also helped us carry out important gene knockout operations.
You can see all of our Partnership.
Although scientists and researchers have made a lot of efforts and countless sacrifices for the development of science, and at the same time do promote the continuous progress of science and technology, we find that the public still has a large misunderstanding of the technical means and direction of scientific development. Therefore, we try to take our responsibility to popularize the progress of scientific research to the society and close the relationship between scientific research and social life by introducing the recent progress of synthetic biology and our project.
As iGEM high school students, we know that synthetic biology can greatly contribute to the development of scientific research in the new era. In order to attract interest, we have designed a variety of activities, from children to adults, to actively carry out online and offline science popularization and communication.
You can see all of our Education and Communication.
This year NJXDF-CHN 2022 has tackled and solved one or more of our project's problems and use synthetic biology tools to generate expected results. To achieve the production of 2-PE, we firstly characterized and identified the optimal phenylacetaldehyde reductase (PAR) by screening the entire genome of Y. lipolytica. Next, we refactored the Ehrlich Pathway to improve 2-PE production. To further improve 2-PE yield, we attempted to delete the competing pathways. All BioBricks were registered and tested, and most of them work well to perform their functions as expected. For more details about our parts, you can visit our Engineering Success page.
During the iGEM competition, we jointly organized 4 sessions. In these sessions, we enhanced communication and collaborated with other iGEM teams in different regions, by setting different conference topics, such as educational, human practice, experimental, and so on. Specifically, thanks to all teams that have helped us along the way. It is because of the teamwork that we can sow, germinate, thrive, blossom and give off fragrance like our flowers.
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Regarding our HP program design, each part of the activity has a clear goal. We make the best use of the HP’s results to improve our project by what we want to achieve. As the project progresses, we divide our HP’s goals into three sections by task type: Background, Public Engagement, Project Design and use these as a guide for our activities. In addition, to ensure that our HP activities were normative and ethical, we consulted with relevant people to guide the design of our activities.
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The increasing environmental pollution and world population, novel processes are required to meet the higher demand while maintaining safety, nutritional value and sustainability. We attempted to engineer the nonconventional oleaginous yeast Yarrowia lipolytica as a competitive platform host to produce 2-PE, which can be considered as an economically viable alternative to plant extraction. The high-yield host can be directly used in the fermentation production of 2-PE, and after downstream separation, purification, concentration, freeze-drying and other steps, 2-PE preparations can be produced and used in medicine, food and cosmetics industries, which we have fully discussed. We also considered the safety, legality and compliance of engineering strain in project design and proposed implementation.
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We have or will meet all deliverables on the Competition Deliverables page.
We have created a separated page on our wiki showing the attribution of each aspect clearly.
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We have documented how we were inspired and finally selected our project on the “Project Description” page, and we also introduced how we originally achieved our goals.
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For the Contribution, we supplemented the experimental characteristics of the part elements in Yarrowia lipolytica and Escherichia coli (BBa_K3753000, BBa_K2533034, BBa_K4180002). These investigations included the identification of heterologous phenylacetaldehyde synthase, cofactor equilibrium and verification of lipid accumulation-related gene Snf1, and these data were added to the corresponding BioBricks. All of these may be helpful to other teams and we hope it will make some contribution to the iGEM community.
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