HP silver

Human Practices Silver

Activity: Public Speech on campus

In order to strengthen undergraduates' awareness of scientific research and promote the dissemination of synthetic biology, we, XJTLU-CHINA iGEM team，delivered a public speech on general scientific research on May 11th, 2017.

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.