Team:OUC-China
Background research
We made a questionnaire to investigate public opinion on the fermentation industry, all the information have received the permission of respondents for publishing.
The graphs below showed the age distribution and educational background of the respondents. The background of the interviewees is distributed in many majors, such as pharmacy, network engineering, automation, food science, biotechnology, architecture and so on.
Here are main results we can conclude from the questionnaire.
1.Most people know something about fermentation industry
2.Most people in China do not know much about yeast for fermentation and synthetic biology.
Industry
We contacted the local Vland Biotechnology Co., Ltd. for field investigation, this is a local company in Qingdao that focuses on synthetic biology and fermentation. We visited their R&D department and laboratory, and learned about the specific links and production environment of fermentation factory production. In the communication with them, we learned that fermentation technology and strain improvement are important factors that restrict the development of fermentation industry. Among them, strain improvement is very important. So we decided on the final direction of our project.
After the project design was basically completed, we communicated with their related technical staff and got their opinions about our project. We visited the laboratory designed by them to simulate factory conditions, and learned that in the actual fermentation production process of the factory, the ambient temperature was very high, and temperature regulation could not be realized if the temperature difference was too small. After fully absorbing their opinions and combining the actual situation of the fermentation plant，We adjusted our loop according to this, and deleted the temperature control system we designed before.
We also had further conversations with their R&D department about our project. In exchange learning, we learned that the current improvement of strains to improve production generally starts from improving rate-limiting enzymes in the reaction process, reducing redundant branches, improving the expression capacity of key enzymes and improving promoters. We also communicated with the person in charge of their fermentation production department and improved our project according to their suggestions.
Teacher
We also visit our school's professor Liu Guanglei. After listening to the introduction of our project, Mr. Liu put forward some improvement directions and problems for us to pay attention to, which helped us to better improve our project.
Qingdao Energy Institute
In the process of the experiment, we contacted Qingdao Energy Institute for exchange and learning. We learned that aloxonose synthesis is an extracellular enzyme and our system could not be used, so we changed our design and designed an aloxonose DNA aptamer, which proved our idea to some extent.
Future
After the experiment was basically completed, we were going to continue to cooperate with the company. In the future, we plan to introduce their production genes into our engineering bacteria to test our achievements.
