Team:USTC/Integrated Practices

Modeling

Dawei Xi

Yuan Du

This year our team focused on yeast prion SUP35, trying to make it a useful tool. So after we primarily determined what we would do, we cousulted Dr. Dong Men from Wuhan Insititue of Virology for advice. In the middle of this summer, we attended the conference held in NCKU, Taiwan. There we introduced our project design and potential applications. During our project, we also did a survey about public opinions on yeast prion being applied. We also communicated with Team HFUT. We learned about each other's project, giving and gaining suggestions.

When getting trouble in scientic research, seeking help from other researchers or institutions is always a good way and so did we. We contacted Dr. Dong Men and got the SUP35NM gene which was vital to our experiments as well as some practical suggestions.

This year, our project involves yeast prion Sup35. Although we had got the genomic sequence of it before we started our experiment, we failed to acquire this sequence for lack of saccharomyces cerevisiae containing it. So we searched on the web for any institutions which were possibly doing researches with Sup35. Then we got to know that Dr. Dong Men, Associate Professor of Analytical Biotechnology in Wuhan Institute of Virology of Chinese Academy of Sciences was who we were desiring to contact.

We first emailed him on July seventh, delivering our respect, explaining what we were going to do and making it clear that we needed gene model of Sup35 or specific saccharomyces cerevisiae containing it as well as some professional advice on our project. Before long, we got reply, knowing that Dr. Men Dong was dealing with nano material of auto-assembling protein useful for sensing with Sup35 and willing to offer the plasmid containing sup35NM gene if we agreed to sign MTA.

He required more details about our motivation and goals to give advice.Then we further expounded our initial plans in detail and the trouble we were facing. We emailed each other several times after that and exchanged amounts of useful information. Besides academic suggestions, he underlined that we should set a specific research target, for instance, solving a scientific issue.

We learned a lot through the contact and got it clear how we should carry out our project. Most importantly, we received the desired SUP35NM gene after signing MTA, without which we would not be able to develop our experiments. We delivered our sincere appreciation for him in our acknowledge part.

The 4rd International genetically engineering machine competition Asia conference was held in Tainan, Taiwan by National Cheng Kong University (NCKU) in August, 2016. More than 20 teams from Taiwan, China mainland and other Asian countries joined the conference for understanding each other and meeting many friends. The conference included official presentations along with Q&A and a poster session. This is the first time we got to know what other teams were doing this year. During the meeting, we introduced our project to all, received much valuable advice and gave much advice about other teams' work, especially the team BIT. And the host guided us to visit the amazing city--Tainan where many treasures and collections sit. We sincerely acknowledge NCKU for their warm service and we gained a lot through the conference.

To find out what the public know about prion and their attitudes to it, we designed a questionnaire including several questions and distributed it to different people on the Internet. This questionnaire contains 7 questions.
1.What's your education backgroud?
A.high school or below
B.undergraduate
C.bachelor
D.master
E.doctor

2.Do you know something about prions?
A.I haven't known it.
B.I have heard about it.
C.I'm familiar with it.

3.Do you know something about prions of yeasts?
A.I haven't known it.
B.I have heard about it.
C.I'm familiar with it.

4.We are trying to construct a genetic circuit with yeast prions for scientific research or industry. Are you worried about the application of it to industry or food production?
A.Yes
B.No

5.Yeast prions can not infect human beings because there is no protein corresponding to them in our bodies. Furthermore, researchers are trying to employ them to know more about bovine spongiform enceohalopathy(mad cow disease) and Alzheimer's disease. Are you worried any more after we tell you these facts?
A.I'm not worried but we should use it carefully.
B.It can be used for scientific research but should be forbidden from industry.
C.We should prohibit all kinds of usage of it for we haven't understood it completely.

6.Yeast prions can self-assemble and aggregate or disperse according to different temperature or drugs.Do you come up with some innovative application of them?

7.What problems or obstacles do you think could affect the application of yeast prions to industry?

We got 1269 answers from different kinds of people and thus we could make some analyzations from these valuable data.

From the question 2 and 3 we can analyze the knowledge of the public to prions and yeast prions. Q2: Q3: Since most people don't major in biology, we do not expect them to be very familiar with prions. We are glad to see that a great number of people have some knowledge of it (45.31% of them have heard about it or are familiar with it). However, the percentage of people knowing yeast prions is much less (12.69% of them have heard about it or are faliliar with it). We consider that it is because people are more likely to hear something about the horrible mad cow disease in news reports or Alzheimer's disease by contacting with some senior citizens suffering from it. Thus they began to search information about the diseases because of fear and curiosity, then they may get in touch with the word "prion". However, when it comes to yeast prions, people might know less about them for they cause no serious diseases and have less influence on people's life.

We also try to find out whether the eduction backgroud of people can have some relationships with their knowledge about prions. By analyzing the responders' education level and their knowledge of prions together we are surprised to find the relationships beyond our expectation.

In common sense we expect that people's knowledge about biology increases when they get more education. Yet we discover the percentage of undergraduate college students knowing prions(405 out of 559 =72.4%) is much higher than that of bachelors(75 out of 396 =18.9%), masters(31 our of 72 =43.1%) or even doctors(23 out of 38 =60.5%). Even the percentage of people with high school or below education knowing prions(41 out of 204 =20.1%) is a little higher than that of bachelors. Maybe you can comment that the number of masters and doctors we research is too small to make the conclusion, but the data for hundreds of bachelors and undergraduate college students can reveal the strange phenomenon.

We find two explanations for this phenomenon. The first one is that the change of education theories and courses in universities and high schools may cause the students nowadays to know more about subjects out of their own majors. Nowadays many colleges in China expect their stuents to learn general knowledge of all kinds of subjects to equip them with basic comprehension of these fields and help them make correct decision when choosing their majors. Even high schools are trying to lead students to learn more in the subjects they are interested in. However, universities in the past encouraged students to learn more about their majors as they can and become proficient in their fields, thus resulting that students who don't major in biology know little about prions and this can explain why there are less percentage of bachelors(graduate students from univiersities in the past) know prions than undergraduate college students and high school students. Another explanation is deviation in choosing our samples. Since we spread this questoinnaire on the Internet and many of our team members major in biology, their classmates or friends in the same major may be more likely to have connection with them on the Internet and willing to answer these questions about their interest. This may cause the invalid statistics of the group of undergraduate students.

Now let's see the relationship between people's attitude to the application of prions and their knowledge of it.

We can conclude that answerers haven't know about prions are more likely to be worried about the application of them in industry than those who know something about them while yeast prions are impossible to infect human beings. This result can explain why it is important to popularize general scientific knowledge to the public to avoid misunderstanding.

In question 5, we try to explain that yeast prions are safe enough for application and scientific research, after which we could see the changes of attitudes of the answerers.

After our providing some knowledge about yeast prions, we are glad to see these who haven't known prions before answering the questionnaire changed their contradictory attitude to prions and the percentage of them holding the 3 different viewpoints is similar to that of people know about prions before respectively. About 64% of people are not worried about the application of yeast prions and agree that we should use them carefully enough. Clearly we can see that our efforts worked and the public can make their own decisions rationally after being equipped with related knowledge.

Finally we got many ideas about new applications of prions and difficulties we should consider from the reponders in question 6 and 7.

Here are some of the answers.

Question6: "To make some temperature-sensitive medical devices." "Maybe we can use it for 3D print by controlling its aggregation." "We can develop targeted drug with it by connecting prions with devided pieces of drugs. We inject the dispersed prions into the patients and let them to aggregate in the focuses, thus the pieces of drugs can be self-assembled and work." "Since yeast prions are sensitive to some drugs, can we employ them to test these drugs?" "Is it possible to use them to control the programmed death of fungus in bioengineering?" "What if we try to construct micro-robots with prions?" "If we can find how yeast prions be affected by some drugs, maybe we can find similar structures in human's prions, thus we can find a cure for Alzheimer's disease." "Maybe it can be used to produce a new kind of glue and we can control whether it works by changing the temperature." "Since they could be connected to macromoledules and their aggregation can shorten the distance of these chemicals, maybe they can become catalyst in industry."

Question 7: "Are you sure they are safe enough for humans only by analyzing theoretically without conducting a lot of experiments?" "Please be careful when transforming yeast prions to prevent producing another "mad cow disease" for humans." "You should try to provide enough information for media first to avoid them from spreading wrong reports and misleading the public." "You should make efforts to maintain their activity for a long time if you want to apply them to industry successfully." "Maybe you can change its name to make it sound less horrible for the public." *Prion was translated into Chinese as "Ruan Bing Du",which means protein virus. "Consider potential side-effects to the environment and you should ensure they are not spreaded out of labs or factories." "Make sure to control the reaction efficiently to prevent them from ruining the whole production system if there is emergency."

An integral part of learning from each other is the free exchange of ideas and viewpoints among older learners. There’s nothing like listening to or taking part in stimulating discussions to help us see the other side of an issue. That give-and-take opens our minds and brings us to a whole new level of enlightenment. In that case, we communicated with HFUT. As a software team, they do not have their own lab. So first of all, we showed them around in our lab. After showed them the using methods of some biology experimental devices, we gave them an introduction of how synthetic biology researchers work, which benefited them a lot. Three team leaders then introduced their project. After hearing their work of literature analysis and gene relationship visualization, we found it an interesting idea. Also, the others thought our prion project a revolution practice. In the end, we gave suggestions to each other. To make HFUT's project more adorable, we shared our common way of searching and reading documents.