Team:USTC
General HP
Overview
In order to make our project responsible and good for society and have it optimized, human practice was supposed to play a supporting role in every step of project implementation. Not only would we thoroughly consider the influence our project might have on the world, but we also were intended to talk to the public, society, experts and other competitors through presentation, course or offline event for feedback to reflect the results in our daily meeting, modify and improve our project according to it. Also, remember to look at how we carried out Human Practices into our project.
Responsibility
Background When studying Cinnamon Oil, we found a organic compound named borneol with simple structure. We found its superior performance in crossing the BBB, wide usage in the surface modification of LNPs (lipid nanoparticles) to load brain-targeted drug. However, due to possible side reactions and the relatively low chiral selectivity, chemically synthesized borneol cannot meet the standard of purity and safety. Today’s borneol for medical use still highly depend on extraction from dipterocarp（Dipterocarpus turbinatus Gaertn.f.）. But the efficiency of extraction from dipterocarp is very low. According to the data from Chinese natural borneol industrial report in 2018, every acre of dipterocarp could only produce 3kg borneol. What’s worse, the resource of dipterocarp is at the edge of depletion because of deforestation. On the contrary, the huge demand of borneol with high purity is still increasing today, which makes it too expensive to use in mass production.
On the other hand, the number of patients with neurological diseases is still increasing. It is estimated that in China every year there are 40,000 new cases of epilepsy. Those diseases not only make patients themselves in pain but also brings a heavy burden on their family. With more and more people suffering from different neurological disorders, it’s urgent to develop a new method to manufacture borneol modified drug with both high efficiency and selectivity in large scale.
Presentation
Online Propaganda Meeting Combining Eight Schools
In terms of larger propaganda scale than offline event, our team participated in the joint science popularization activity of iGEM teams form eight universities, which was organized by ShanghaiTech University. This event included six main sections: the Universe, Optogenetics, Metabolism, Engineering, Bioactive Materials, Agriculture and Forestry. Facing non-professional audience, each school shared their creative ideas and comprehension of the topics, along with background knowledge related thus the meeting content were perfect full and multi-faceted.
We took part in the presentation of the Bioactive Materials section on the night of August 13th through Tencent Meeting. Baced on our study into magnetosomes, we introduced an interesting electromagnetism phenomenon about the magnetosomes produced by an archaeobacteria --magnetotactic bacteria. To explain this novel biomineralization progress in detail, we gave a brief introduction of its background and ecology effect, origin, generation of magnetosome. Finally applications of magnetosomes as bioactive materials expanded our boundary, ending this meeting successfully.
The event attracted many middle school students, college students and members of the community to watch online. We believe it meaningful for it not only allowed us to consider what public needs, but also train our expression and self-show ability.
School Presentation
In order to introduce the iGEM competition to freshmen , we delivered a lecture to students who were not familiar to the university life and conception of scientific research. In this lecture, we demonstrated our laboratory picture which was constructed for us students and specific assignments of different parts of our iGEM group. Then we introduced our project in detail to show them the whole procedure that how we screened a project with a promising future and designed specific experimental scheme. What made us excited was that students showed exceeding enthusiasm for iGEM competition and that they enquired many questions about it. After this lecture, we led them to our laboratory and introduced them how to use various experimental apparatus. Through this lecture, we kindled the students’ passion about participating in iGEM competition and pictured them the future on doing student’s scientific research.
Campus Event
1. science and technology event week
To make our activities realistically meaningful, connections with society must be built. Only in this way can we transmit professional knowledge or skills to enlighten people and popularize the charm and significance of biological science and technology. Therefore, we always adhere to this principle during the whole Tech week, which is embodied in every aspect of this well-organized activity.
We eventually decided to set up booths on our campus to receive visitors from local communities. Each booth has a game and a little gift as the prize. During the preparation stages, we tried hard to make our games both interesting and informative. To make our games interesting, we come up with various ideas. We have prepared biological models like fluid-mosaic-membrane and T4 phage model. Moreover, we also prepared plasticine for our young visitors to shape such models and meanwhile we introduced the structure and relevant information about the models. Besides, we attempt to show some experiments with catchy phenomenon. Thus we used calcein as an indicator, which can be altered from light pink into fluorescent green. In addition, we also teach our visitors to make their own veins bookmarks, which helped us to attract a great deal of people. To make our games informative, we have to choose appropriate knowledge which is both easy-understanding and educational. Also, considering that our visitors range from pupils to adults, we classified knowledge into different levels according to their extents of difficulty. Consequently, we selected knowledge ranging from those which close enough to daily life to those which slightly professional to ensure that everybody who participated in our games can take some knowledge away.
Children from local primary school actively joined in and showed great interest and curiosity in biological knowledge. While those older students who had attended biology class in their junior high school turned out to be more excited. They gained our gifts by exploiting what they have learnt to answering questions in our quiz, and they also learned something from those questions they couldn’t answer. We are convinced that our effort are meaningful for the reason that we successfully popularized some useful biological knowledge and maybe those students engaged would have more interest in biology than before.
2. Course set up for Synthetic Biology
On the campus, The most convenient way to learn a field is to take a course. To give students in USTC access to systematic training in synthetic biology, Prof. Hong Jiong, our PI, presented a course called Introduction to Synthetic Biology. Students can easily choose this course considering their interests, and they can get credits after finishing it. This course will introduce the basic principles, methods, the advantage of synthetic biology, and the advance of synthetic biology. The students will discuss how we can obtain more information on synthetic biology and integrate them into our studies. Finally, the students will be required to design a project based on their interested field. We believe that every student who takes this course will have a thorough understanding of synthetic biology.
Integrated HP
Overview:
In order to make our project responsible and good for society and have it optimized, human practice was supposed to play a supporting role in every step of project implementation. Not only would we thoroughly consider the influence our project might have on the world, but we also were intended to talk to the public, stakeholders, experts and patients through online or offline self-display and communication with audience, reflect the results in our daily meeting, modify and improve our project according to that. Also, remember to look at how we carried out Human Practices into our project.
Public Account
In such a connected world, social media is a powerful tool to convey ideas and get the public involved. And we are lucky enough to live in a time where everybody can achieve this with highly developed platforms. We chose WeChat, maybe the most widely used social application in China, as a window to show ourselves and spread meaningful and interesting content. We created an official account called “USTC iGEM” where WeChat users can subscribe to and read all our posts.
We has posted one original article to tell about the connection between our daily life and goal products. Using vivid vocabulary, not only to introduce the knowledge of borneol, but also analyze the main components and chemical structural formulas of edible borneol. In some cardiovascular disease drugs, different doses of borneol are included as well. Borneol has a nickname, “Dragon brain” , which is often heard in our daily lives.
Syndication Post
At the same time, we reshipped another article posted by SCUT-China, which is relevant to our project topic. This cooperation led much stream to both of our accounts and received many looking through and thumbs up. It also made us look more like brother university with the similar research direction.
Participation in CCiC
Our team participated in the 9th CCiC hosted by ShanghaiTech University with 1224 attendees, including 85 participating teams and 45 individual participants. CCiC（Conference of China iGEMer Community) is a national summit independently initiated by China's iGEM participating teams, aiming to provide a platform for iGEM teams to take part in, share resource and promote mutual learning as well as information exchange.
Although we had no chance to arrive in Shanghai to communicate with partners face-to-face offline because of the epidemic, we were still enthusiastic and active to get in discussions with players across China. Our team shared online on the afternoon of August 20th, and had a heated debate about questions the host judges from other teams put up with, and the final evaluation responded great. In the process of preparing and representations, we gained more inspiration, which helped us to constantly improve our project design. At the same time, during the meeting, our team members also listened carefully to the reports made by other school’s iGEM teams, took some notes, and participated in the discussion, which opened up our ideas, gave us a lot of activation and laid a certain foundation for the design of next year's project.
The Conference not only brought us many brilliant ideas on the topic, but also made us form a deep friendship with the iGEM teams of other schools, helping us to cooperate and make progress together in the future.
Experts Visiting
Consultaion
Professor Haiyan Liu: "Close to frontier of biology and requirement of medicine."
Knowing that Professor Liu Haiyan is adept at synthetic biology and just submitted an article to Nature successfully, we asked to him for consultation about our alternative ideas come up with in the brainstorm. He evaluated the advantage of our facility level and limitation of competition time while approbating our diverse directions.
When facing the problem of leaking organisms with modified genes, lacking efficient inactivated method to handle our yeast, Prof.Liu provided us with a blue light-inducible protein gene to control the self-killing of it. This gene switch played an important role in our latter experiment. Another assistance from him was the screening of the best choice of one of our seven enzymes, which set an excellent example for our subsequent process.
We also attained the access to the lecture given by Prof.Liu because of our consultation and communication, in which we learned a lot and drew quantities of measures.
Original
Professor Jiong Hong: "Explore a feasible product in Yarrowia lipolytica especially terpene."
Jiong Hong: In the initial preparation phase of our experimental project, Professor Hong has been following up on our project. Because their lab also studies yeast, they have a lot of strains we need. He was also happy to provide us with these things. It is he who provides us with a strain of lipopolystic Yeasts. Later, we used this strain as an engineered bacterium to produce borneol. He was fully involved in the conception phase of the experimental project. He participated in almost every large group discussion. We originally wanted to produce cinnamon essential oil, and he pointed out the sheer size and irrationality of the subject. That's why we reduced it to the production of borneol and used it to improve LNP. When we were stumped by the design of the protocol, he provided us with some valuable advice that allowed our experiment to go smoothly.
Developement Qihua Wu：“Final practice needs more consideration.”(Executive of Anhui Lianchuang Biological Medicine Co., LTD.)
Mr. Wu is an alumnus of USTC who chose to devote himself into entrepreneurship. In the process of promoting the experimental project, we conducted some cooperation and communication with his company. Mr. Wu was very willing to help us.He explained some knowledge related to chemical conversion to us, helped us improve our experimental scheme design, and gave his opinions on the problems related to the industrial production of borneol that we proposed. We learned a lot of new chemical knowledge in hisshare, which is very useful for our future experiments and expectation. At the end, he also praised our autonomous innovation and active search of help and communication out of our campus, which will booster our project development much more. Therefore, we are very grateful to Mr. Wu for his warm-hearted help and encouragement.
Supplementary
Researcher Qian Zhang: "Feel free to exert your creativity and supply is sufficient."
Qian Zhang:, the teacher in charge of the iGEM laboratory, who provided us with a place for experiments. Before we began the experiment, she provided us with safety guidance and instrument training. During our experiments, she helped us purchase the necessary reagents and supplies. In addition, she is concerned about the progress of our experiment and provides us with useful suggestions.
Factory Visiting
Foreword
A research can firmly root in not only laboratory but also practical life only by integrating itself into real requirements. In order to combine our experimental results with actual manufacture, our team paid a visit to Anhui Lianchuang Biological Medicine Co., LTD. During the visit, we learned to realize two aspects outside studying: environmental protection and production cost control.
Environmental Factor
Though factories with autonomous production line emphasize the cost of industrial production in the hope of high profit, Anhui Lianchuang Biological Medicine Co., LTD also fully considered environmental protection factors. During the visit in their workshop, the mechanics showed us a professional means of the disposal of chemical waste. Knowing that our target modified site located in genomes within organisms mainly prokaryote bacteria, their engineer reminded us higher consideration and standard of industrial trash containing genetic repair. Surplus of nutrition cultivating engineered bacteria has the risk of eutrophication so later digestion is a necessary step. To avoid pollution danger of escaped lived bacteria together with their man-made gene, this waste can’t serve as fodder of livestock but follow operational process. Under national and international restriction of gene modified organisms, we had better use diatomaceous earth to grind final waste and handle it in batch. Thus, we obtained a series of suggestions given by senior practitioners.
Costal Factor
In terms of production costs, the prior cost of outcome produced on a large scale in industrialization needs to be relatively low, ensuring its profit. In order to successfully commercialize scientific research results, we require low costs and high outputs. The competitive advantage with counterparts lies in increasingly better production. Therefore, we often need to choose enzymes that have low volume for the addition of materials but high efficiency for catalysis. The amount of enzyme should be used as small as possible to facilitate subsequent processing and product purification.
Summary
Through this colorful visit, we have a deeper understanding of the concept of combining scientific research and factory production. In future research tasks, environmental protection and production costs will be taken into our account.
