Team:Jilin China/HP 06

Interview

the professors

On June 2nd, to make our design of the project more robust, we communicated with Prof. Hongyu Xiang from the School of Life Sciences in Jilin University, who majors in microbiology and has focused on synthetic biology for these years.

Firstly, we introduced the iGEM competition and our ideas of Geneguard system to Prof. Xiang. He asked us some questions and gave us suggestions based on his knowledge. Besides, we also investigated deeply into the application and prospects of synthetic biology and some safety issues. Prof. Xiang spoke highly of our idea of using toxin-antitoxin system to make the engineered bacteria much safer.

We learned a lot about the safety concerns currently towards bacteria from Prof. Xiang and we appreciated his suggestions.

We also interviewed associate professor, Dr. Yan Li from the School of Environment Science in Jilin University on September 6th. Dr. Li just finished her PhD studies from the University of Connecticut and she specializes in disposing polluted water with a variety of methods, such as fermentation and bioelectricity system. We wanted to get some inspiration from her investigation.

After introducing our project to Dr. Li, she got interests in it. We asked if the energy-consuming problem within sewage treatment could be solved, and she introduced her designation of some microbial fuel cells, which can not only treat the sewage but also generate electricity for other uses. Since we knew that the treatment of chlorophenol requires much electricity, it is helpful to combine the two methods. Furthermore, we also learned that domesticated microbes were used in Dr. Li's project, for which sodium acetate was added as the carbon resources to help the growth of the bacteria. And it occurred to us that we could co-culture various types of bacteria so that one could transfer the pollutant to more carbon resources to promote the productivity of the cells.

At last, Dr. Li also showed interests in cooperating with synthetic biologists. She said she would help us to focus more on microbial fuel cells and bacteria co-culture.