Team:Fudan China/HP/Silver

"Safe, responsible and good for the world"

Human practice is aimed at provoking careful thoughts about whether ‘the work is safe, responsible and good for the world’. Bearing that thought in mind, we have taken our project back to the city we live, and came up with new ideas to improve our project.

A visit to the city sewage plant

Our project focuses on the contruction of a new kind of cellular memory machine which is capable of recording the changes of a signal in an extended time period. This aspect of our memory machine can be extremely useful in monitoring the chemical changes in the environment. So we contacted one of the biggest sweage plant in Shanghai—Xinchu sewage plant and paid a visit there.

During the visit, we talked with the workers in the plant, who told us the limitation of the current monitoring and expressed his expection of our memory devices.

We also learnt a lot about the basic process of sweage processing. We are surprised to find out that biological fermentation plays an important role in sewage processing. Actually, the decrease of COD value of the sewage is mainly caused by the consumption of the microbes in it. And the sewage plant has specially designed an Ultraviolet disinfection tank to get rid of most of the microbes just before the sewage is ready to be discharged into Huangpu River.

At the end of our visit, we took some samples from the biochemical reaction pool. Back to the laboratory, we used the samples to dig out more possiblities of our engineered bacteria.

With both the advices and the experiment we conducted back at our laboratory, we came up with a lot of ideas that can be integrated into our project. We will talk about it in detail at the ‘gold criteria’ page.

E-mailing the experts in biological synthesis

We have also laid eyes on the field of biological synthesis, one of the most dynamic field among all the application of genetically enginneered microbes.

We e-mailed two researchers from Shanghai institute of organic chemistry (SIOC) to learn about the current development of biological synthesis

From the conversation, we have also gained a lot.

  • Currently, the type of substances that can be monitored in a working fermentation tank is limited to simple molecules like oxygen and carbon dioxide. The dynamic monitoring of more complicated compoud like the target protein and its intermediate product is not available in most cases. That may be a problem our memory device can solve.
  • The infection of different bacteria in the fermentation tank can be a serious problem. If we want to monitor the substance directly inside the fermentation tank, special attention must be paid to control the spread of the engineered E. coli. A suicide gene at the end of the circuit has again become a good choice.

Applications in daily life

What can a tiny sequential memory machine do in our daily life? That is also a question we are interested in. So, we advertised on our Wechat plateform to collect ideas from the public. We got about three hundred clicks in a couple of hours.

We got ideas like ‘building a memo in sequential order, so that things can be done properly’. The ideas are quite crazy and may not be fullfilled by our project, but we do see an affection for an easy check of all the collected data via cellphone apps. If we want to popularize our memory device among the public trying to digitalize the result can be a good start.

Conversations

At the same time, we are also involved in lively conversations both within the iGEM community and the more diversed world beyond

At the school club fair

To spread the idea of synthetic biology and also to show that biological researches can be fun, we brought our project to the club fair of our school. One of our team members dressed up as a cute E. coli to interact with visitors. We all had a lot of fun. Finally, we got about 20 people want to sign up for next years’ iGEM competition and a lot more to visit our Wechat platform.

The university biology summer camp

We held a lecture to the students attending our biology summer camp BIOS together with another team from our university Fudan. Here are the pictures showing students listening to the speaker carefully.

A primary school in Anhui provence, China

During the summer holiday, One of our team members went to teach biology classes in a primiary school in Huoqiu, Anhui procince. The lessons involves creative ideas he get in his iGEM experience. The picture here documented the moment the student looking curiously at the result of the experiment.


As a active participant of all the iGEM conferences

our team is an active participant of all the iGEM conferences. We get inspiration, friendship and precious memory from these conferences.

2017 5.19-5.21 BUDS

At the the initiate of our team, we attend the conference named BUDS held by Nanjing university, where we talked about the problems we may face when building up an iGEM team. These talks proved to be very useful in the following long course of the competition.

2017 7.30-8.3 the 5th Asia-pacific iGEM conference

Not long after we have started the main part of our experiment, we attend the 5th Asin-pacific iGEM conference held by NCTU, where we talked about our strugglings with the experiment result with all the other teams. It is during the presentation on this conference that we have the idea to look into the problem of how to make a good presentation.

2017 8.19 FABO Open Night

Among all the conferences, this one is the most unique one. Instead of sitting inside a conference room, we talked about our project outside in an open square. The audience includes both iGEMers and local residents, making it full of surprise and fun.

2017 8.27-8.31 CCiC

The CCiC held by FAFU gave us an opportunity to show our project in an mature and completed way. We brought our brick toy to the conference, had it tested and got the feedbacks. We met the team from Peking univercity, who also focuses on recombinase. We talked and get some very useful information from them.