Team:UST Beijing/Background
Background
Who is Pangu
Pangu is a well-known legendary figure in Chinese mythology. Chinese Tradition tells us the universe was created and formed by Pangu, who is a primitive, hairy giant.
In the mythology, the universe was nothing but a formless chaos. It took 18,000 years to form a cosmic egg. There is a balance in Yin and Yang, and Pangu emerged from the egg. It took another 18,000 years to separate Yin (the earth) and Yang (the sky). To keep them separated, Pangu stood between them and pushed up the Sky. With each day, the sky grew ten feet (3 meters) higher, the Earth ten feet thicker, and Pangu ten feet taller. This task took yet another 18,000 years. After the 18,000 years had elapsed, Pangu died. His breath became the wind, the mist and the clouds; his voice,the thunder; his left eye, the sun; his right eye, the moon; his head, the mountains and extremes of the world; his blood, rivers; his muscles, the fertile land; his facial hair, the stars and the Milky Way; his body hair, bushes and forests; his bones, valuable minerals; his bone marrow, sacred diamonds; his sweat, the rain; and the fleas on his fur carried by the wind became animals.
Why are we building a Pangu cyclase
We found that in human beings’ bodies, there is a cyclase looks similar to the Oxido Squalene Cyclase(OSC), while it cannot generate ginsenosides. For gensenosides are beneficial for health, we wondered that if we could create a gene that will help produce ginsenosides in our body. Furthermore, sometimes Pangu genes are more accurate and useful, so we designed it with Pangu modeling.We select human signal peptide as the first 90 amino acids as Pangu cyclase. In the next part we take ginseng cyclase as skeletons. We chose to use ginseng cyclase as the skeleton of Pangu cyclase because the advantage if that contains higher similarity, less obstruction and better optimization. We found the spatial structure of the teo groups was different,and the difference amoung the first 90 amino acids in the sequence was pretty large. Some active site residues differences exist in these two cyclases. This cyclase structure enables human body to produce PNA itself to reduce possibility of heart and circulatory disease.
What have been doing this year
We analyzed the pet28a-β-glucosidase plasmid and pSB1C3-pBAD-T7RNAp plasmid in double-transformed E. coli, and using JDesigner software we set up the model of β-glucosidase expression. This model displayed the process of pNPG’ decomposition in wellsv. We continued to explore this project this year.
What is notoginseng
Notoginseng is mainly originated from remote mountain in south China Provence Guangxi and Yunnan. Properties: warm, sweet and slightly bitter taste in the live, stomach , large intestine. The function of Panax notoginseng, originally available "stop the bleeding, blood stasis, and pain" these six word to sum it up.
Total saponins of Panax notoginseng(PNS), is the active component of Panox. Since last century, many researchers has taken a series of studies and revealed pharmacological actions of PNS. First, PNS is easier to combine with lipid, prevents more and more CT accumulating in blood. Next, PNS is the dilation of blood vessels and lower blood pressure. The mechanism generally accepted as inhibition of calcium influx dominated by adrenalin.
Reference
(1) UST_Beijing igem 2016 https://2016.igem.org/Team:UST_Beijing/HP/Gold
(2) Pangu-wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pangu
