Thinker-ShenZhen  ChDeHome

In July, our team and Thinker-China conducted iGEM experiments at the Tsinghua Graduate School in Shenzhen at the same time and separately, receiving guidance and advice from our co-instructors, purchasing experimental consumables, and giving each other suggestions for experimental improvements.

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In addition to the previously mentioned synthetic biology lecture at Shenzhen Middle School, we also focused on another top high school in Shenzhen, Shenzhen College of International Education, and conducted an online synthetic biology lecture. Our two teams sent representatives to work together to create PPTs and presentations, distribute questionnaires, design peripherals, and create promotional videos. The team members from SMS, SCIE and BASIS gave a wonderful and interesting lecture to high school students of different age groups, mainly introducing the origin, development, current situation and outlook of synthetic biology, clarifying the importance and practicality of synthetic biology, showing the audience an interesting synthetic biology, and hoping to plant the seeds of synthetic biology in their hearts.

Online lecture due to COVID-19

Hold our lecture successfully

Given that detecting fungi on the skin requires patients to visit a hospital in person, our two teams decided that we could use Thinker-China's low-cost detection device to detect specific substances secreted by fungi to determine the presence of fungi after an in-depth understanding of both projects and discussions.

Regarding this issue, our two teams have kept in close contact subsequently and hope to design a system for detecting fungi together.

To help more teams understand the requirements of sustainable development in a simple and clear way, our two teams co-hosted a webinar on sustainable development, in which we clarified the definition of sustainable development based on relevant information: development that meets our needs today without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs. We focused our discussions on the environment, economy, energy, and security, and made reasonable and feasible sustainable development recommendations for others. At the end of the meeting, we decided to work on drug side effects, production costs, and environmental pollution to better implement the sustainable development goals.

Since E.coli 1917 is non-toxic and harmless, we originally intended to apply E.coli 1917 containing chitinase directly to human skin for fungal treatment and suppression, but it was difficult to release the intracellular chitinase and other unrelated genes of E.coli 1917 in the released material, so we had a different idea: to produce a large amount of chitinase in a factory and purify it into a high purity enzyme product for human application. In this way, we can avoid the danger of gene leakage and prevent the problem of failure of some E.coli 1917 expression, resulting in poor bacterial inhibition. In our project communication with Thinker-China, we found that since it does not work in human, we can use E.coli BL21, which can produce endotoxin but has better expression ability, to express titinase in the plant, which can greatly improve the yield. But even if the yield is increased, how can we release the large amount of intracellular gibberellinase? Considering that Thinker-China's project included a lysis component - containing arabinose manipulants and SRRz splitting gene - we asked them to assist us in designing a lysis system, and after relentless efforts, we also included a lysis system in our project to disrupt the BL21 cell wall to release the titinase, and finally the purification process to remove endotoxin and other impurities to obtain a high purity titinase product.

We received video help from Thinker-China during the competition, including but not limited to video submission and video editing. We encountered some tricky problems when submitting videos to the iGEM website, and thanks to their help, we were able to submit them on time and smoothly.

Thanks to Thinker-China's help in creating the promotional video for our SCIE lecture, we were able to get an excellent promotional video.