Since the very beginning of our iGEM journey, we have had a strong desire to make culturing bacteria a more convenient step for researchers studying in basic research and manufacturing in industrial production. It was that desire that led to the design of the fluorescence indicator which can mark the growth status of microorganisms automatically. After a lot of background research, discussion, and consultation with experts and industrial companies, we planned to implement our project in three aspects, basic research, industrial production, and clinical research.
We built an automatic bacterial status indicator. It consists of an engineered E. coli that can express different fluorescent colors at different status, and a camera system that can picture the colonies on the plates automatically and upload the pictures onto Google Drive. We applied YOLO5 and OpenCV in our system, which can analyze the center coordination and the RGB value of the colonies. After all the progress, the user will get informed by our official account in the Line Bot App, which is a free and commonly used social media application in our local society. By the notifician sent by our official Line Account, the user will get to know the status of the colonies, and the experience record of all the time the bacteria were cultured.
A customer kit would be used for the delivery of our E. coli between laboratories. Promoters and reporter genes in our product are specifically designed for the DH5α strain, and extra modifications would be made before applying them on other microorganisms. Therefore, an instruction manual for the design and testing of fluorescent growth status indicators would be attached along with the kit to meet customer requirements.
Beside the great improvement in basic research, we also believe that our growth phase indicator could bring significant advance to industrial production. Microbial organisms have been widely used in manufacturing industries for production such as recombinant protein expression. After consulting with experts, we made up our implementation plan. Our engineered E. coli would serve as a marker for informing the status of E. coli. It will help save time and manpower in measuring the growth status of bacteria. In addition, some protein production requires adding an inducer at an exact time, for example, adding IPTG at the log phase. Our project could inform users the best time to add the inductor. Furthermore, our remote monitoring system can solve the awkward situation of observation unavailable during the weekend. Considering the safety of our project implementation, we designed the filters which could provide an independent space in the fermentation tank for our engineered E. coli, preventing “the product” from being contaminated by our tool's fluorescent proteins.
In the culturing tank, our engineered strain and the origin microorganisms will be cultured together. E. color will be wrapped in a filter, which could limit the range of activities of it, to prevent its influence to the origin microorganisms.
Our project is also planned to be implemented in the clinical field. With the health crisis of antibiotic resistance rising, scientists have been looking for a new antibiotic drug. With the well shown colors in our product, we have a strong belief that our product can take the experiments such as drug screening or antibiotic susceptibility test to the next level. The native color and the growth phase indicator can serve as the alert of whether the drug is effective. This could save time and manpower of waiting and measuring the result.
In conclusion, E. color is an integrated project which brings benefits to the world from lab to industries, and from researchers to manufacturers.
In general, our product is used in laboratory settings. Despite the fact that our product will not cause harm to human health, there are still safety issues that we should take into consideration. After constant reflection, we found two potential safety problems, Accidental environmental release and contamination during co-culture, and came up with a strategy to solve them.
To know more about the safety designs in our project, please visit the Safety page on our website!