We appreciated all the teachers, professors, doctors, companies, other iGEM teams, every participant in our education and communication activities, and everyone who interacted with our project. They truly gave us precious advice and inspiration throughout the project.
Please visit our Attribution page for more information!
This year, the 2022 NYCU-Taipei iGEM Team — “E. color”, presents a gene-edited E. coli DH5α product which could provide real-time, remote monitoring of bacterial growth by integrating the use of growth status indicators with a user-friendly detection device. Our product aims to benefit researchers in both laboratories and the biomanufacturing industry using bacteria as a host-vector system. By using reporters to indicate different growth statuses, this foundational advance could increase the convenience and efficiency of microbial use in basic research and industrial settings, hoping to impact the scientific community.
For more information, please visit our Description page!
Our project, E. color, is a valuable approach that can provide an easy and remotable detection of bacteria growth phase. With E. color, users can easily know the stage of bacteria and do further treatment such as induction for the bacteria. Therefore, we believe that E. color can contribute to the basic research, industrial application, medical purpose etc.
The NYCU_Taipei team has made many accomplishments which can contribute to other iGEM teams. It includes the wet lab achievements, software, and hardware.
For more information, please visit our Contribution page!
One of the aims of our project is to construct the indicator for E. coli growth phases. We developed three engineering cycles, and successfully put our design into practical use.
We selected several promoters based on the mRNA expression profile and combined them with fluorescent protein as the reporter gene. In the first engineering cycle, we found that some of the promoters did not work as we expected, and the early exponential phase was too difficult to be observed. Therefore, in the second cycle, we adjust the use of promoter and fluorescent protein and remove the early exponential phase from our project. The result shows that we successfully construct the indicator for mid-exponential, late-, and stationary phases. From the first cycle, we also found that the fluorescent protein will last since its expression. However, the stability of the fluorescent protein prevents us from determining whether it is caused by continuous expression or the poor ability to be degraded. To determine its characteristics, we use the fast degradation mCherry (BBa_4461013) for fast degradation. The result suggests that our promoter would continuously express from a specific phase. In the end, we design the degradation system to eliminate the interference of lasting fluorescent intensity.
For more information, please visit our Engineering Page!
Collaborating with other iGEM teams was a meaningful journey where we exchanged thoughts and mentored each other throughout the troubleshooting process. This year, the NYCU_Taipei team has experienced wonderful collaboration with Wego_Taipei team, HKUST team, and NTHU_Taiwan team. And we also attended the 2022 Asian Federation of Biotechnology Regional Symposium and the 2022 Taiwan Synbio Alliance.
For more information, please visit our Collaboration page!
This year, the NYCU-Taipei iGEM team aims to develop an advanced fundamental tool for monitoring bacterial status. Since tracking microbial status is crucial for many experiments and real-life applications, we hope our product could benefit microbiological researchers and widen our social impact in diverse aspects, including the basic scientific, industrial, and medical fields.
In Human Practices, we present the progress of our project, including background information that ignited our research motivation, project goals and solutions, proposed implementation, and efforts our team conducted to ensure that our product could bring practical impact to the community and the world.
For more information, please visit our Human Practice page!
E. color is an integrated project which brings benefits to the world from lab to industries, and from researchers to manufacturers. Our implementation plan included three aspects, primary research, industrial production, and clinical research.
For more information, please visit our Implementation page!
Our project consists of five phases and six milestones.
Since the start of our journey, we have been continuously integrating opinions from stakeholders, experts, and the public to add our initial project design. After gaining feedback from our human practice events, we reflected on potential challenges such as biosafety and the feasibility of a real-life application. These reflections enabled us to reposition our core project value and construct a comprehensive end product. Our project consists of five phases and six milestones.
For more information, please visit our Human Practice page!
We designed the degradation system and improved the mCherry (BBa_J18932) by appending it with a degradation tag (BBa_K1051207) as the component. This tag is the recognition sequence for the adaptor, SspB, which will then carry protein with this sequence to the protease. Therefore, by combining with the protease and specific promoter, the fluorescent can be turned on and down.
For more information, please visit the Improve page!
The bacteria growth model is a kind of logistic function variation with numerous parameters. We've used three parameters in this function, L stands for the maximum value of bacteria, k goes for the growth rate of the log phase, and ti denotes the end of the lag phase. Most of the experiments investigated the relation between temperature and pH value on the growth curve, so we decided to focus on figuring out more diverse environmental parameters, which is the initial quantities and re-growth time from different phases.
For more information, please visit our Model page!
To verify the function of our remote monitoring system for E. coli growth phases, we used step-by-step experiments to verify that our project is able to inform the E. coli growth phases to the user through the LineBot system. The proof of concept is divided into 3 parts, including phase indicator, monitoring device, and LineBot system.
For more information, please visit the Proof of Concept page!
This year, we had a wonderful experience in partnership with the Wego_Taipei team. We have several meetings, discussions and collaborations on the whole of both of our projects.
For more information, please visit our Partnership page!
The NYCU_Taipei team cherished every opportunity engage with public from different backgrounds in the field of synthetic biology. Several public engagement projects have been organized, including a five-week internship program for high school students, an educational video spoken in native language, several educational posts on social media, a podcast, and an on-campus synthetic biology seminar.
For more information, please visit our Education & Communication page!