Throughout history, the pursuit of beauty is universal.
In ancient China, there was a book that recorded those exotic flowers and plants, and rare birds and animals with cosmetic effects from the warring states period to the Qin Dynasty, called the Classic of Mountains and Rivers. On the ancient Indian continent, as early as 3000 BC, the world's first cosmetic Ubtan was born, which is a body application used for the beautification of the body. The local people adjusted the proportion of plants and herbs in the recipe according to different seasons, different skin types and cosmetic effects. All of these reflected the attention that people paid to beauty at that time.
Nowadays, people do all kinds of things for cosmetic effects and skin refinement. They go to facial spas regularly, and use skincare products with various skincare efficacy. Skin care has already become a lifestyle for ordinary people.
Last year, the main idea of our project was to create a self-growth anti-pseudomonal artificial skin for burn treatment (See 2021 SZPT-CHINA for more details), among which bacterial cellulose (BC) was used as a dressing for promoting burn wound healing. BC is also an ideal material that provides skin hydration and moisturization. Therefore, we intend to develop a skincare product utilizing BC based on our last year's project.
There are plenty of skincare products on the market, and each product has its specific skincare efficacy. However, different people have different needs for skin care. Those who need to fight against aging may also need to moisturize their skin, and those who need to repair may also need to brighten their skin. To achieve multiple efficacy at the same time, a variety of skincare products are often required.
Then, what skincare efficacy do people mainly need? In order to find out the answer to the question, we looked for relevant data (Figure 2). The survey shows that the main skincare needs are moisturizing, anti-aging, brightening, repairing and anti-spot.
Therefore, we decided to develop a multifunctional skincare product. We planed to use BC to achieve the efficacy of moisturizing. For brightening, anti-spot, repairing and anti-aging, these cosmetic efficacy are closely related to antioxidation. So, we want to use an appropriate antioxidant to achieve these efficacy. Glutathione (GSH) is an ideal option. Glutathione is an effective antioxidant that can permeate the skin owing to its relatively small molecular weight (307.33 Daltons). Moreover, glutathione is a safe ingredient that human cells can produce autonomously.
However, glutathione itself can be easily oxidized due to the existence of sulfhydryl groups, and can be easily decomposed when exposed to water, heat or light. So, it is a big problem in terms of preservation and usage. And we learned from Winkey (a cosmetic peptide supplier) that there is a problem in the application of glutathione to skincare products due to its instability. As a matter of fact, many cosmetic formulators have already given up the use of glutathione in skincare products.
To solve the problem of the instability of glutathione, we came up with an idea to take the form of live bacterial product, which provides "fresh" glutathione rather than a mask containing glutathione. The consumer can use this live bacterial product containing our engineered bacteria, which have a high yield of GSH and release GSH only when needed, so that they can get the freshest GSH. To this end, we designed a blue light control system to manipulate the lysis of the engineered bacteria for the release of GSH.
For BC production, Gluconacetobacter hansenii ATCC53582 is used as our chassis. In our last year's project, we used near infrared light (NIR) to regulate the production of BC (Figure 4) to form a highly fitting and applicable dressing on the skin. Therefore, the same module was kept in our new project this year. Moreover, the lysate of G. hansenii is rich in various organic acids and thus can play a role in maintaining skin microbiome.
Specifically, a recombinant Beauty G. hansenii strain expressing the bifunctional glutathione synthetase GshF was constructed for enhanced GSH production. The engineered bacteria can produce BC as a moisturizing film under NIR light and release GSH as well as bacterial lysate under blue light to provide anti-oxidative effect and maintain skin microbiome.
Taken together, we designed a dual-light-regulated live bacterial dressing with the cosmetic effects of moisturizing, brightening, anti-spot, repairing, anti-aging and skin microbiome maintenance using the tools of synthetic biology and optogenetics. It's not only a skincare product with various efficacy, but also an innovation in product form. It provides a novel method of preserving active ingredients, uncovering a new possibility for skincare products.
Our project is named "Beauty G. hansenii -- A Self-growth Multifunctional Film for Cosmetic Use" for three reasons. First, our product can independently produce BC under light control, which means it has self-growing ability. Second, it has multiple skincare efficacy such as moisturizing, brightening, anti-spot, repairing, anti-aging and maintaining skin microbiome. Third, the product ends up in the form of a film.
The main elements of our logo are the camera aperture and Beauty G. hansenii. By using the product of our project, people will have healthier skin, become more beautiful and have the desire to take photos. The seven-color aperture means that we will use the light control system.
In the middle of the logo lies a Beauty G. hansenii, for it is the engineered bacteria of our product. We designed it to lean back because We wanted it to feel casual and comfortable, just like our users' experience. In fact, we designed it holding a magnifying glass in the first place, but we thought that this could not reflect the characteristics of our project, so in the follow-up improvement, it evolved into what it is now.
In the final version of the logo, we gave Beauty G. hansenii a pair of legs to better show its lazy lying position. This was not presented in previous versions.
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