In early June, vice-captain Zihao Song was invited to visit Zhejiang University and had a remarkable interchange with members of ZJU-China on the project design and problems encountered in the experiment. We learned about the novel idea of the ZJU-China Bacter_elic project, that's using microorganisms to induce the mineralization of calcium carbonate precipitation to store fossil information. Their creative thoughts opened our minds to the endless possibilities of synthetic biology applications in archaeology. During the seminar, our two teams established a deep friendship and planned to collaborate further in this and future years.
Fig 1. Meeting with ZJU-China
On June 25, our team participated in the iGEM North-South Exchange Forum hosted by the SUSTech_EMB team at the Southern University of Science and Technology. The forum was held online with 10 undergraduate teams from universities in north and south China. Each participating team highlighted the background and design of the topic, as well as the conception of biological information analysis and human practice.
At the conference, SCU-China highlighted the main content of the project, which is to establish an E. coli Nissle 1917(EcN) independent ecological niche in the intestine with erythritol as the carbon source, to achieve long-lasting colonization of probiotic bacteria, and to produce coenzyme and antioxidant substance PQQ and hypoglycemic substance L-erythrulose. Meanwhile, we showed the critical milestone of pre-experiments: engineered EcN can be grown in M9 medium with erythritol as the only carbon source. The other participating teams endorsed our idea as significant work, which built up great confidence for our subsequent experiments and work. We also shared with other teams the doubts that came up during the project's design, for example, whether EcN will utilize erythritol as a carbon source in the presence of glucose. The teams inspired each other through close communication and provided much inspiration and suggestions for improvement in the subsequent work.
Fig 2. The Poster and Conference Program of iGEM North-South Forum
On August 14, our team was invited to participate online in CRISPR meet-up co-hosted by the UESTC_BioTech team from the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China and the HainanU_China team from Hainan University.
By introducing each team's project, the participating teams all understood each other's projects. Among them, guests SongLin and Liu Zhirong from CCIC and members of the conference affirmed our preliminary work and highly evaluated the project. In response to our final presentation of the project, the guests also gave their views and suggestions. Professor Liu pointed out that live organisms are extensively digested in the stomach, so yogurt is not the best way to deliver probiotic bacteria. The density of engineered bacteria in yogurt can only reach the billion level. In contrast, the dried probiotic powder obtained by lyophilization technology and then delivered by encapsulation technology can reach 100 billion and have a longer shelf life. As for the problem of testing the effectiveness of the engineered bacteria colonization in the project, our team takes the results of co-culture experiments as the primary basis and will do some animal experiments for verification after the project.
And during the follow-up free talk, the teams discussed the CRISPR technology, metabolism-related modeling and other issues. For the UESTC_BioTech team's difficulties in the process of electro-transformation, we offered some advice based on our own experimental experience. For their team's confusion in metabolic flow modeling, our team introduced the concept of the GEM model and shared the experience of building the ODE model, which played a crucial role in advancing their topic.
Fig 3-4. The Brochure and Conference Program of CRISPR Meetup
Between July and September 2022, SCU-China participated in ICII (Into China Into IGEM), a domestic promotional event organized by the NAU-CHINA team of Nanjing Agricultural University, with the participation of 12 teams from leading universities in China. During the two months, the teams from the 12 universities regularly gave lectures about the project of this year in the form of live or recorded lectures on the Beeper or Tencent conference platforms, aiming to popularize the knowledge of synthetic biology. The content covered various aspects such as the CRISPR system, nitrogen fixation and hydrogen production technology, tumor targeting, bacterial therapy, and depression research. During the conference, SCU-China released a series of tutorial videos for recording molecular cloning experiments, which vividly described the steps of each experiment operation. At the end of the conference, each team produced videos combining the characteristics of their school and the regional style of their city, which were used for collaboration and promotion in the subsequent activities of each team. This event provided an opportunity for everyone to enter and get to know synthetic biology, which showed us the great potential of using synthetic biology to solve real-world problems.
Fig 5. The Poster of ICII
From August 18 to 21, SCU-China participated in the CCiC (Conference of China iGEMer Community) hosted by the ShanghaiTech_China team at ShanghaiTech University. Due to COVID-19, the forum was held online and involved 85 teams from all over China. Each participating team highlighted the project's background and design, also looking ahead to the bioinformatics analysis and Human Practice.
Compared to the previous communication, our team expressed more strong willingness to cooperate with other teams, hoping to further expand the function of our engineered probiotic platform by introducing some related therapeutic enzymes. During the communication, our project attracted the attention of several teams, including BIT-China, and was finally selected as the Best Presentation Finalist. Unfortunately, after further discussion, we found no enormous scope of team cooperation, mainly on experimental protocols.
Fig 6-7. The Certificate of Participation and Best Presentation Finalist of the CCiC
During 2022 iGEM, SCU-China built a solid collaboration with HZAU-China in many ways.
View more in PartnershipOn October 2nd, 2022, SCU-China was invited by BIT-China to have an online meeting to communicate on the process of each other's project. BIT-China's project this year is Oxygen Hunter, which focuses on using low-oxygen components to provide a suitable environment for chemical processes that require a local hypoxic environment, such as nitrogen fixation and hydrogen production. Their demands in building a hypoxic environment are similar to our project on constructing an independent colonization system of E. coli based on the erythritol metabolic niche in the intestinal tract under low oxygen conditions. So we mainly shared the methods and results of the computational simulation of establishing a hypoxic environment in multiple E. coli strains co-culture. Afterward, the two teams exchanged views on Human Practices and wiki design issues and explored the possibility of collaborating in this and the subsequent competition year. The two teams kept in touch after the meeting and helped each other during the wiki freeze phase, which built a precious friendship.
Fig 8. The Meeting of SCU-China and BIT-China