Team:XJTLU-CHINA/HP/Silver
HP Silver
Activity: Public Speech on campus
We, XJTLU-CHINA iGEM team, delivered a public speech on general scientific research on May 11th, 2017, in order to strengthen undergraduates' awareness of scientific research and promote the dissemination of synthetic biology.
Dr. Boris Tefsen from the Department of Biological Sciences and Dr. Jia Meng from Bioinformatics stream were invited as our guests. Students from all different departments interested in synthetic biology and the iGEM competition were encouraged to participate in this public speech.
Dr. Jia Meng emphasized the significance of research experience to undergraduate students and encouraged our students to apply the knowledge and principles learned in the class to solve real-world problems.
Dr. Boris Tefsen gave us some specific information about practical skills on handling bacteria in the lab, which have been frequently used in our 2017 iGEM project. He also talked about that the abuse of antibiotics nowadays causes the bacteria that he had isolated in recent years to become resistant to multiple antibiotics. He believed that if the combined use of L. lactis and antimicrobial peptides could deal with bacterial diarrhea effectively, it could be a good way to reduce the use of antibiotics.
In this public speech, we also presented the primary ideas of our iGEM project, hoping to get some feedbacks and comments from our students and professors.
Feedback And Suggestions
Some students gave us suggestions and came up several questions about our project. One student expressed that the conditions in the laboratory and in the guts have distinct differences, and it is very possible that the peptides will be degraded by the protease synthesized in the guts and the pH in the guts may also denature the peptides, making them ineffective. Thus, we decide to design some vivo experiments, at least, to prove that our project can function in mammalian body.
Some graduates worked in pharmaceutical companies or fields related to medicine were also interested in our project and gave their opinions. When referring to make our L. lactis a drug, hoping to partly replace antibiotics in cure, they shared some ideas about how to isolate pathogenic bacteria and to identify antibiotic resistance, how to kill these microbes if most antibiotics cannot work and during the time waiting for assay results of bacteria, how doctors control the situation.
Due to their suggestions, we reconsidered and redesigned part of our project to make our products more effective in patients.
Activity: The 2017 STEM Festival
Talk About Synthetic Biology And Intestinal Health
During the 2017 STEM Festival, we had successfully organized a talk about synthetic biology and intestinal health which is related to our projects. Curious parents, who showed strong interest in biomedical sciences and attached great importance to early STEM education, took their children to participate in this activity. We introduced the idea of delivering medicine using genetically modified bacteria as well as the concept of creating “shining” trees by inserting illuminant genes from other creatures into trees. We mentioned how to prevent intestinal diseases and how our project will benefit those patients with serious bacterial infected gut problems that cannot be treated well by traditional antibiotics.
One parent mentioned, “this talk itself was quite riveting and informative. I am happy to see my kid deeply attracted by the variety of colorful pictures of bacteria and how they interact in our body. For me, the talk deepened my understanding on intestinal health. The gut is the largest digestive and immune system in the body, you cannot be healthy and happy without its improper functioning.”
"Unwashed Hands" Experiment
To stimulate kids’ strong enthusiasm and curiosity in how bacteria work in our intestine to affect our health, we prepared a handy and interesting experiment for each young visitor to visualize the vastness of bacteria present on our unwashed “dirty” hands. The kids were asked to press their hands on petri dishes twice, one before and one after washing hands. We collected the plates, cultured the bacteria at 37 ℃ within a day and finally sent the results to the owners to amaze them with the great amount of the “bad” bacteria on their unwashed hands. We are also deeply impressed by the children’s avid passion for science. These children all wished themselves to become scientists in the future!
After the talk a mother asked us about some details of the iGEM competition and applauded our competence, courage and confidence. She also encouraged her daughter to learn biology in the future, “follow your heart and work hard if you like it”, she said to her little girl.
Presentation Of Science Models
In addition to organizing science presentation, we also placed science models in the exhibition stands, which aroused many kids’ great interest. A number of children appeared to be curious about these models, gazing at them and pondering for a while. When some little kids were playing with the intestine model, we explained to them what it was and how it functioned. We told them that it was beneficial to drink yogurts every day to keep it healthy.
We also provided a microscope on the desk to let our visitors to observe a diverse type of specimen. It was a precious opportunity for them to see the wonderful and mysterious microscopic world.
Introduction To Our Project
Many parents were engrossed and inquired about the underlying mechanism of our projects. We illustrated them in details that our aim was to kill Staphylococcus aureus, a bad bacterium, in the guts by newly found antimicrobial peptides, which can be expressed and accumulated in genetically modified Lactococcus lactis, a probiotic bacteria strain. “Lactococcus lactis is quite commonly used in fermented dairy products like cheese,” Bailee, one of the iGEM team leader said, “Only when L. lactis senses S. aureus will it release the antimicrobial peptides, so it will not start producing the peptides when there is no input (the presence of S. aureus).”
Feedback And Suggestions
Notably, it was proposed by an audience who worked in a hospital that it was a necessity to simulate the intestinal environment to testify the validity of our medicine (or strategy) in the real world condition. Therefore, we made more collaborations with several hospitals later to deepen our understanding on intestinal diseases in order to better fine tune our project design.
Likewise, some staff in a biotech company showed great curiosity in how to combine synthetic biology and healthcare knowledge to realize the project on fighting against superbug. They inquired about some details of our experiment design as well as its practical applications. They not only gave us enthusiastic supports, but also provided us some advice on the advancement of our project.
Activity: The Conference of China iGEMer Committee(CCIC)
From 26th to 28th August, organized by the iGEM team FAFU-CHINA, The Conference of China iGEMer Committee(CCIC) was held in Fujian Agriculture and Forestry University. Eight three iGEM teams across the country with professors from School of Life sciences and doctors working on synthetic biology, 300 people totally, participated in this conference. The CCIC has been held for three consecutive times, and this year, the fourth was the largest communication platform for all iGEM teams in China. The conference lasted for 3 days, and simulated the agenda of the Giant Jamboree in Boston. The CCIC consisted of the presentation section and poster section. In addition, this year the CCIC conference had several special seminars in the evening of each meeting days. These seminars were delivered by from some of the current iGEMers. The presenters introduced the knowledge and concpts related to their projects and want to inspire other teams in the future. For example, in the seminar of the first night, the topics included microRNA and optogenetics. The concepts from these presenters introduced us to a totally new field how cell can be controlled by light.
In the CCIC, we had a presentation to share our ideas and thoughts with other teams. The presentation topics included how Staphylococcus aureus can affect human health, what probiotic strain is used as the host to run our circuit, the ideas in the design of the circuit and the problems we faced at that time. We hoped to get some advices from other teams to improves our work. Fortunately, TMMU has sharesa similar project with us, thus we had same common problem in our work. A professor from TMMU came up a question on how our antimicrobial peptides can specifically target on S.aureus and without affecting other probiotic in the guts. A common problem on the circuit construction for our two teams was how to deal with cloning the agrC and agrA genes. Both of us found that the agrA gene had a very high tendency to be mutated during cloning. During our conversation, we suspected that protein AgrA might be a toxic protein for Lactococcus Lactis, thus it cannot be inherited stably. We improve our project based on the comments from other iGEM teams and iGEM the HQ judge’s suggestions during the conference.
In this conference, many interesting projects attracted us a lot. We studied from some ingenious designs on how to construct a much more complex pathway. Circuit design in synthetic biology is requires understanding of knowledge from many different fields and very precise design in assembly of many different parts with various functions. We keeps learning and acquiring more knowledge on gene expression and metabolic coordination of cells to improve our premature project in the future.
Collaborators and Supporters
