Team:TokyoTech/Medal
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Achievements
Medal Criteria
| Bronze | Register and attend | We registered for iGEM, had a great summer, and attended the Giant Jamboree. |
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| Deliverables | We met all deliverables on the Requirements page. |
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| Attribution | We created an "Attributions" page on our team wiki with clear attribution of each aspect in our project. (Click here) |
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| Characterization / Contribution | We participated in the Interlab Measurement Study. (Click here to read more.) |
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| Silver | Validated Part | We experimentally validated and documented new BioBrick Parts/Devices (BBa_K2505000, BBa_K2505001, BBa_K2505005 of our own design and construction that work as expected. |
| Collaboration | We helped Team IONIS-Paris with offering a BioBrick part, mentored Team ASIJ Tokyo about the modeling and qualitative analysis and held a practice session with KAIT Japan at Boston University. |
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| Human Practices | We organized a symposium for middle school and high school students, held a workshop at high school to raise the awareness of young generation, attended summer school to learn about the relation between synthetic biology and social epidemiology. |
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| Gold | Integrated Human Practices | By integrating with our Human Practices and the results from our wet lab experiments and modeling, iGEM2017 Team TokyoTech have executed our project with improved design in accordance with comments from general public, and have strengthened the public engagement of a two-way dialogue between our team and the public through this summer. |
| Improvement / Characterization | We correctly improved a BioBrick Part (BBa_K553001) |
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| Model your project | We simulated the whole co-culture system and it turned out the improvement of traI is necessary. We improved the gene using point mutation and after reflecting a new parameter in the simulation, we observed that the population of E. coli is controlled. |
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| Demonstrate | We conducted assay to measure the toxicity of bacterial signaling molecules and validated that our project have to work under realistic conditions. |
Best Information Processing
In iGEM history, many teams including Tokyo_Tech tried information processing between bacteria. This year we tried to establish an artificial cross-kingdom communication between human cell and bacteria then enable their co-culture. We call this new artificial human-bacteria co-culture living system “Coli sapiens.” Many factors like growth rate of human cells and bacterial cells are quite different and it is difficult to consider the all parameters to the model. In complex systems, only essential parameters were selected and an abstract model was designed.
To evaluate this model, drylab comprehensively simulated the property of the system using data from the experiments. As a result, our simulation contributed to the suggestion of part improvement to wetlab. This part improvement increased the feasibility of the model and it indicated that concentration of E. coli could be controlled by human cells and the condition for co-culture. Thus, we succeeded in engineering a new living system of co-existence between human cells and E. coli. This could be a progress for iGEM.
Proof of Concept
If we can establish a co-culture system, we can find a way to achieve population balance to sustain the co-existence and apply for the medical field like a cancer treatment. In addition, since human and bacteria have originally co-existed, the establishment of a co-culture system will contribute to the development of organism closer to life.
