Human Practice
PrefaceWhy We Do This
In recent years, cancer has become one of the most serious killers threatening human health. Morbidity and mortality raising continuously, cancer is becoming a primary death reason and a significant public health problem. As is reported by Chinese Cancer Statistics 2015, there will be more than 4 million new cancer cases and nearly 3 million deaths of cancer in 2015. It has become one of the most serious problems facing by China, even globe, to treat cancer effectively.
Aiming at different kind of cancers, different medicine and treatments have been developed based on different therapy principles. However, the detecting and screening of medicines now is conducted based more on chemical methods, which is sometimes complex and time-consuming. Inspired by the properties of microtubule-stabilizing agent taxol, we developed a method to screen medicines based on the microtubule stabilization. If microtubule-stabilizing molecule exists, our engineered protein will polymerize and show light which can be detected through microscope. We expect it to be a more sensitive and effective system screening anticancer agents.
Our Human Practice is based on the project and included interviews, investigations and games we designed
PREPARING BEFORE BEGINNINGMini-iGEM
We organized the Mini-iGEM competition, which took a month, before our project began. As its name, the competition is for small iGEM projects designed by ten groups. They worked as iGEM’s pattern and designed a project or solve a problem using principles of synthetic biology. Then we invited some professors to score these projects and give their advice. Through this competition, we found some inspiring ideas and on the other hand deepened students’ understand of iGEM.
Here are some of posters of Mini-iGEM.
Investigation of Taxus yunnanensis
As to our project this year, we modified the homo sapiens tubulin alpha 1a , connected it with luciferase report gene’s N terminal or C terminal , and we put the modified α-tubulin and β-tubulin into E-coli to reduce them . Then we will get a kit containing the tubulins and buffer which has the appropriate condition verified by experiments. We call the kit “taxolight”, and it can do these things:
1. drug screen
Anti-cancer agents especially paclitaxel have showed their magnificent power in clinical application, but also are a little unsatisfactory. We still need to look for new drugs that more effective.
The existing method to screen anti-microtubule agents needs purifying tubulins of mammalian brains. It relies on the features of tubulins that the solution turbid will increase when then polymerize in vitro under 37℃ centigrade. So using this method, we can get a polymerization curve shaped sigmoid formed by the liquid OD value to the soaking time, correspondingly, we can also get a de-polymerization curve when putting the tubulins into ice. When adding different anti-microtubule agents, polymerization of "S" type curve or pour de-polymerization of "S" type curve has different effects, and we can determine the role of the drug according to the change of curve. The defects of this method are as follows:
