PROJECT

SCU-China

Look What They've Done To My Shoes!

Foot odor and athlete's foot are close"friends"of human beings and lead to daily problems.

This year,we designed an innovative insole called"Comfootable"to prevent them by two strains of engineered E.coli,whose names are"Rihanna"and"Drake"respectively.

VHb gene is involved in both strains to promote their growth ability in tough environment and some genes in two strains are knocked out to keep the strains themselves odorless.In strain"Rihanna",CecropinXJ,an antimicrobial peptide,is supposed to be expressed in fusion protein form,which will be released and attack other microorganisms including fungi after foot temperature inducement.In strain"Drake",liv operon/polyleucine protein/aminocyl-tRNA and aarC are expected to remove the odor in shoes.This insole has a specialized structure and proper material to make sure the successful diffusion of substrate,availability of microorganism growth and biosafety.Two strains are mixed together in the insole system to grow.Furthermore,we did a lot of modeling works,and we hope our product will be available on the market someday.

TMMU_China

Our subject for 2016 is a"blue-white"filtrating system,a convenient platform for fast target-gene inserting and filtrating.

UESTC-China

The world is facing more and more serious plastic problems.From 1964 to 2014,the global plastic production increased by 20 times.PET is globally used in plastic production.In 2012,the demand for PET has reached 3000 k tonnes.Traditional methods to solve too much plastic are landfill,energy recovery and recycling,but these traditional methods have many limitations.

The chemical degradation method is better than traditional mechanical processing which has better application range and recycling value.However,because of the technology and equipment lead to the expensive cost,the chemical degradation can not be fully realized commercialization.

Our team find a way using microorganism to degrade PET to solve the problems.Yoshida et al.found a bacterium,Ideonella sakaiensis 201-F6,that can living of PET,and figured out two enzymes capable of degrading PET and is reaction intermediate.We are trying to transforming E.coli to produce PETase out of cells.Now,we have transformed many plasmids including different genes which are associated with degrading PET into Escherichia coli and assayed its capability.Some of the E.coli show the potential function to degrade PET.

UESTC-Software

Combined with the characteristics of electronic information,we have an interest in the two aspects:biological computing and biological information storage.In the promising field of biology,we used our professional strengths to make a research and discuss the selection of project.

In the DNA information storage area,we understood that the existing software applications about DNA information storage were still very small,and had not reached the real utility yet.Some features such as low synthesis accuracy,slow speed,high cost and so on,make us want to improve and standardize the DNA information storage software.At present,there are a variety of algorithms about DNA information storage,we think of sorting out them to develop a DNA information storage platform-Bio101.It can realize the existing computer file coding and decoding,solve the problem of storage format standardization.Furthermore,we will try to complete random DNA information storage function.

In terms of biological computing,we mainly focus on the design of genetic transcription circuit based on living cell in biological computing.The research of gene regulatory network needs to study in living creatures,and the function of plasmid transcription is affected by various conditions in the experiment.Inspired by the cello software,we plan to achieve an interactive genetic transcription circuit design platform-Bio1024.It owns visual interface and produce genetic circuit sequence through drag the modular components.Users can set parameters of each component of the circuit.Eventually,software gives the function prediction of the circuit performance.This platform has strong practicability.It makes the abstract concept presented in the practical function.

Besides these designs,we developed a game software named Bio2048.It's an Android game based on the Grabriele Cirulli's"2048",a popular sliding block puzzle game.Instead of the numbers,the blocks are labeled with some common biological patterns,such as gene and protein.All the patterns form a biological ladder by their spatial scale.If two patterns with the same biological terms collide while moving,they will merge into a pattern with a new biological term which moves up by one on the biological ladder.This design aims to promote the biological knowledge among youngsters.

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