What we have accomplished

     With brainstorming and bibliographic search, we finally made our project "Reach For Light"! Our experimental design consists of four modules: SAMe module, directed evolution module, oscillator module, and biosafety module. Combining the four aspects, we thought that "Reach For Light" would become a novel and effective treatment for depression. In addition to coming up with the idea, we made a lot of other efforts to realize our project, including the hardware construction, the modeling of the system, the hands-on activities, the collaboration with other teams, and so on. Proudly, we have made the fantastic wiki and fully prepared the presentation to exhibit our efforts throughout this year.

Our team members’ work is listed below:

     Boshuo Zhou-- Coordinate affairs within the whole team and participate in the work of experimental design. Lead the SAMe group’s experiments. Participate and supervise the work of the human practice group and commercial group.

    Jiaze Liu-- Lead the experiments of oscillator group, participate in and supervise the work of art group, business group, web group and human practice group.

    Xinyan Zhang-- Lead the biosafety group experiment, be responsible for the whole team's expenditure, and participate in the business group, human practice group's work and art design.

    Yuewen Gai-- Manage the work of the whole wet laboratory, including linking all the team's experiments and providing assistance to other modules. Responsible for biosafety group, oscillator group experiments and hardware testing. Consult the literature and contact laboratories at other universities or research institutions for assistance. Participate in the work of human practice and part of art design & business plan.

    Chengyuan Zhang -- Responsible for human practice and communicates with some other teams to make better communication. Participate in wet lab and works on the SAMe part.

    Ruiqi Pi -- Design and lead the experiments of the directed evolution group and participate in some of the work of the human practice group.

    Linfeng He-- Participate in the work of biosafety group, commercial group and human practice group, taking a part in art design.

    Yiming Ling-- Participate in the experiments of the directed Evolution group, SAMe group, and participate in some of the work of the human practice group and business plan.

    Hongyu Dong-- Responsible for model building and participate in some of the work of the human practice group.

    Xingyu Xia-- Member of the Mathematical Modeling Group.

    Chufeng Wu-- Member of the art group, responsible for art design and short film shooting.

    Chang Lu-- Member of the art group, responsible for art design and short film shooting.

    Weicheng Zhan -- Head of physical model group, construct gut model to assist experiment.

    Xiaoyi Lin -- Make the wiki and responsible for the main page.

    Zixuan Ding -- Responsible for the business plan, participating in the SAMe group's experiment and human practice.

    Yuqiao Tang-- Participate in the group experiment of oscillator, human practice and part of the commercial & art design work.

    Zhejun Qin-- Participate in the group experiment of directed evolution, human practice and part of the commercial & art design work.

General support

     Wuhan University provides the opportunity for us to attend iGEM. And as a comprehensive university, Wuhan University makes it possible to make our team an interdisciplinary one. Our team members come from College of Life Sciences, Hongyi Honor College, School of Mathematics and Statistics, School of Computer Sciences and School of Urban Design, which makes us an energetic and warm family.

Prof. Yu Chen Primary PI

Prof. Zhixiong Xie Secondary PI

Prof. Fei Gan

Prof. Yi Yu

In order to improve the practicability of the project, we interviewed several experts online and offline. From Professors Zhixiong Xie and Yu Chen, we learned a lot about design, considerations, feasibility, and where or how to do it. From Professors Fei Gan and Yi Yu, we received information and advice on drug production and delivery. We thank these experts for all the information they have provided and for the recognition they have shown. You can see the detailed properties in the integrated HP.

Theory support

[1]Horowitz M, Wilcock M. Newer generation antidepressants and withdrawal effects: reconsidering the role of antidepressants and helping patients to stop. Drug Ther Bull. 2022 Jan;60(1):7-12. doi: 10.1136/dtb.2020.000080. Epub 2021 Dec 20. PMID: 34930807.

[2]Dinyadarshini J.; Sivakumar T.; Vengadesh L. Exploring the Role and Potential of Probiotics in the Field of Mental Health: Major Depressive Disorder. Nutrients 2021, 13, 1728.

[3] Savignac HM, Kiely B, Dinan TG, Cryan JF. Bifidobacteria exert strain-specific effects on stress-related behavior and physiology in BALB/c mice. Neurogastroenterol Motil. 2014;26(11):1615-1627. doi:10.1111/nmo.12427

[4]Kazemi A, Noorbala AA, Azam K, Eskandari MH, Djafarian K. Effect of probiotic and prebiotic vs placebo on psychological outcomes in patients with major depressive disorder: A randomized clinical trial. Clin Nutr. 2019;38(2):522-528. doi:10.1016/j.clnu.2018.04.010

[5]Chen J, Chen X, Ho CL. Recent Development of Probiotic Bifidobacteria for Treating Human Diseases. Front Bioeng Biotechnol. 2021;9:770248. Published 2021 Dec 22. doi:10.3389/fbioe.2021.770248

[6]Messaoudi, M., Lalonde, R., Violle, N., Javelot, H., Desor, D., Nejdi, A., . . . Cazaubiel, J. (2011). Assessment of psychotropic-like properties of a probiotic formulation (Lactobacillus helveticus R0052 and Bifidobacterium longum R0175) in rats and human subjects. British Journal of Nutrition, 105(5), 755-764. doi:10.1017/S0007114510004319

[7]Ma ZF, Yusof N, Hamid N, et al. Bifidobacterium infantis M-63 improves mental health in victims with irritable bowel syndrome developed after a major flood disaster. Benef Microbes. 2019;10(2):111-120. doi:10.3920/BM2018.0008

[8]Galizia I, Oldani L, Macritchie K, Amari E, Dougall D, Jones TN, Lam RW, Massei GJ, Yatham LN, Young AH. S-adenosyl methionine (SAMe) for depression in adults. Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews 2016, Issue 10. Art. No.: CD011286

[9]Han G, Hu X, Wang X. Overexpression of methionine adenosyltransferase in Corynebacterium glutamicum for production of S-adenosyl-l-methionine. Biotechnol Appl Biochem. 2016 Sep;63(5):679-689. doi: 10.1002/bab.1425. Epub 2015 Oct 21. PMID: 26238196.

[10]Chu J, Qian J, Zhuang Y, Zhang S, Li Y. Progress in the research of S-adenosyl-L-methionine production. Appl Microbiol Biotechnol. 2013 Jan;97(1):41-9. doi: 10.1007/s00253-012-4536-8. Epub 2012 Nov 8. PMID: 23135229.

[11]Potvin-Trottier L, Lord ND, Vinnicombe G, Paulsson J. Synchronous long-term oscillations in a synthetic gene circuit. Nature. 2016 Oct 27;538(7626):514-517. doi: 10.1038/nature19841. Epub 2016 Oct 12. PMID: 27732583; PMCID: PMC5637407.

[12]Wang T, Tague N, Whelan SA, Dunlop MJ. Programmable gene regulation for metabolic engineering using decoy transcription factor binding sites. Nucleic Acids Res. 2021 Jan 25;49(2):1163-1172. doi: 10.1093/nar/gkaa1234. PMID: 33367820; PMCID: PMC7826281.

[13]Park EY, Song HK. A degradation signal recognition in prokaryotes. J Synchrotron Radiat. 2008 May;15(Pt 3):246-9. doi: 10.1107/S0909049507062826. Epub 2008 Apr 18. PMID: 18421150; PMCID: PMC2394798.

[14] 一种制备S-腺苷甲硫氨酸的方法. 上海市,中国科学院上海生命科学研究院,2015-04-01.

[15] Wei Y, Li Y, Yang F, Wu Q, Liu D, Li X, Hua H, Liu X, Wang Y, Zheng K, Tang R. Physical and Functional Interplay between MazF1Bif and Its Noncognate Antitoxins from Bifidobacterium longum. Appl Environ Microbiol. 2017 Apr 17;83(9):e03232-16. doi: 10.1128/AEM.03232-16. PMID: 28213540; PMCID: PMC5394336.

[16] Wei Y, Ye L, Li Y, Yang F, Liu D, Guo X, Tang R, Liu C. Functional characterization of RelBE toxin-antitoxin system in probiotic Bifidobacterium longum JDM301. Acta Biochim Biophys Sin (Shanghai). 2016 Aug;48(8):741-9. doi: 10.1093/abbs/gmw056. Epub 2016 Jul 22. PMID: 27451444.

Fundraising help and advice

We appreciate the funds College of Life Sciences provided for us!

Lab support

Schools

College of Life Science, Wuhan University --provided us with a science training lab to conduct all the molecular biology experiments.

Professors and assistors

Prof. Zhixiong Xie’s lab, Prof. Yu Chen’s lab, Prof. Xiangdong Chen’s lab, Prof. Ke Lan’s lab, Prof. Zhishen Du’s lab, College of Life Sciences, Wuhan University--Provided several experimental materials for us when we were in need of them.

Teacher Yan Long--Provided us enough experimental devices and helped us solve problems of machines during our experiments.

Dr. Wang Chao and Dr. Yuanyuan Cui taught us some experimental skills and helped us solve some experimental problems.

Dr. Denghui Wang helped the group of directed evolution and offered some experimental materials.

Human practice support

Organization support

Tsingke Biotechnology-- Helped us in DNA synthesis, primer synthesis and DNA sequencing.

Snapgene - This software helped us to design recombinant vectors and primers. It also helped us do some alignment between sequences.

Solarbio Life Science and Beyotime -- Provided us with experimental reagents.

iGEMer support

HBUT-China

HZAU

WHU-China

CUG

HUST

We appreciate these iGEM teams a lot because they either shared valuable ideas with us to help our project improve or gave us inspirations. We made good friends with these teams in 2022 iGEM competition! You can view specific help in collaboration.

Others

DO & GO

We appreciate the association of people with Depression, DO & GO. Because They helped us to conduct interviews with patients and related popular science activities, so that our project could be more in line with the needs of patients and further expand the influence of the project.

We thank all of our team members' families, relatives, classmates, and friends who participated in the interviews or did our questionnaires.