Leadership

PIs

Professor Jiangyun Wang, as our primary PI, has guided us through the entire process of building and validating our project. At the beginning, Prof. Wang evaluated the candidate projects in our brainstrom and eventually led us to choose FitYo. We often consulted Prof. Wang during the design phase of the project and discussed with graduate students at their group meetings. When we encountered difficulties with our experiments, Prof. Wang was always willing to help and generously let us use his lab equipment. Prof. Wang will also provide us with guidance on presentation preparation and question prediction for the forthcoming judging session.

Dr Liu Xiaohong, our secondary PI, provided more specific training on the use of instruments and laboratory safety. She also suggested modifications with our experimental protocols, which greatly helped us complete our proof of concept.

Student Leaders

Yuchen Liu is the Student Team Leader of our team. During the season, he is responsible for the project funding, brainstorm, team and Jamboree registration, payment of fees, member selection and other fundamental jobs for our team. He conveyed the iGEM values, judging rubric and deliverables to every member of our team, and conducted the division of specific tasks. In the final Wiki composing phase, he was responsible for the integration, proofreading and revision of all pages’ contents. As team leader, he was also involved in communication with other teams and led several HP activities.

Zichen Liu and Ji Sun are leaders of the detailed design and experimental validations of our project. Based on the immature design from the brainstrom, Zichen, Ji and Yuchen utilized the idea of synthetic biology to design multiple genetic circuits. Zichen also integrated and polished the documentations of our project. Ji Sun provided elaborated instructions for the plasmid design and corresponded the company for gene synthesis. He is also responsible for the daily maintenance of our laboratory equipment and the purchase of reagents.

For our dry-lab (hardware, software and model) leaders, see the project section below The Project.

The project

Wet-lab

Yue Lu, Binwen Liu, Bowen Liu, and Yuqi Liu participated in this part. Yue designed the pathway from carbon sources to vanillin and conducted experiments to verify their functions. Yuqi assisted in these experiments. Binwen designed plasmids to produce 3-Methylbutanal and validated its functions. Bowen screened common sump organisms and combined them with our experimental design to select the two strains that we would need to use. Besides, he designed the gene line for 2-phenylethanol synthesis and validated it. Bowen also supervised the design and experimental part of Binwen. Bowen and Binwen were involved in each other's experiments.

Jiaming Li, Yuze Min, and Ji Sun participated in the design and verification part of the 2×2 transfer switch. They found the components that make up the 2×2 transfer switch and designed specific experimental protocols that could verify the performance of the switch. During the experiment, they cultured the engineered bacteria under different light/temperature conditions and observed the expression of the corresponding fluorescent protein using fluorescence microscopy to demonstrate the effectiveness of the 2×2 switch.

Jingke Wang, Xing Zhu, and Zichen Liu were responsible for the suicide switch part. They researched the literature to find a suitable oxygen control switch and toxin-antitoxin system and designed the suicide switch part to prevent the leakage of the engineered bacteria. In the case of plasmid synthesis problems, they designed and performed many experiments to indirectly verify the effectiveness of the suicide switch.

Yiping Li was in charge of the functional material section. Through literature research, he found several proteins that are beneficial to human health and easy to synthesize, designed plasmids that can express these proteins, and successfully expressed these proteins through experiments. This part of the design broadens the range of application.

Hardware Construction

Zhuoxun Chen

Led the hardware workgroup to design the structure of the device, assemble the machine, implement codes to control it. Conducted user-test and led guys of hardware to improve the device with feedback and suggestions from team members of other groups.

Yiyang Li

Build the FitYo-maker with teammates. Drew the PCB. Rendered the image. Beautified the Web. And sketched up the wiki.

Jianshu Zeng

Participate in the project initial design and the overall design of the machine. Build the FitYo-maker with teammates. Investigated the use of components and learned IoT development. Improve and upgrade the device.

Chongyuan Zhu

Designed the panel of the device in detail. Communicated with acrylic provider and made the panel. Build the FitYo-maker with teammates. Drew most of the 3D models. Helped improve the device by designing new structure of the device.

Software Building & Testing

Dingxi Zhang is the leader of the group who set the technical path for our group, provided free Python training for all group members, and managed the entire development schedule of the whole software project. She completed all the Docx2html program and parts of the Oh My Gut game including the design of the game web.

Zikun Zhang assisted Dingxi Zhang with the Python free courses among group members. He finished the SHOP page, which is relatively difficult to develop. He also integrated all three pages into a complete APP.

Zhili Wang finished the DEVICE page and the READ page in APP and were responsible for pack the python files into executable files. He also participated in writing all the documents about our project.

Yuqiao Huang wrote most parts of our game and she was the art director for the software project who was responsible for most of the game's character and page design. It is her and other students in the artwork group's excellent drawing skills that make the game have such a vivid and beautiful visual effect.

Binwen Liu helped write the READ page of the APP and the scripts for the Oh My Gut science game.

Modelling

Yu Jian carried out the model of the Bistable Switch cooperating with Shiwen Wang. Shiwen Wang built two Simbiology models with their derived equations for simulation. Minlong Chen built a mathematical model of a suicide switch and contributed to the temperature switch interval. Huijie Zhang completed the construction of a heat transfer model for the meal replacement machine, and together with Shiwen Wang did the calculation of meal replacement calories. Xinchen Han designed an algorithm to optimize production time and also direct us to plot better graphs.

Human Practices

Zhuofan Wen leads our human practice activities, including collaborations with other teams, survey and investigations, supporting education, publicity of biological knowledge, etc. Specifically, he completed market research and contacted companies to plan the market positioning and target audience of the product. Along with Yuchen Liu, Zhuofan contacted many experts and integrated their opinions about our project and experiments.

Jiaju Li planned and organized a series of educational activities for college and primary school students to pass on the knowledge of synthetic biology. He also assisted Zhuofan in documenting our HP work. Teammates from other groups also participated in and contributed to the organization and recordation our human practices.

Fengling Huang, one of the advisors, contributed to the initiation of our human practices.

Visualization

Xiuliang Zhang, a proficient web designer, constructed our Wiki. Specifically, he completed the coding of our Wiki’s uniform style, and assisting Yuchen Liu in transforming uploading and coding each page.

Dingxi Zhang developed a docx-to-html program to make the composition of our Wiki easier and smoother.

Anxu Liao conducted the graphic design of our Wiki (including the index page) and activity posters. He also directed and edited our videos in the deliverables. Our related photography work is completed by him, too.

Yinuo Chen, Yiyang Li and Yuqiao Huang are the major painters for our project. Most illustrations in our Wiki and software tools are finished by them. Shiwen Wang, Jingke Wang, Yuze Min and Xing Zhu assisted the drawing.

External Support

Our team receives and purchases many external supports, such as gene synthesis and anaerobic experiments (collaboration and partnership are not listed here).