Team:Fudan/Team
- Addon: ribo
- Addon: TALE
- Addon: T2
- Model: transcriptional amplifer
- Model: Notch-ligand kinetics
- Software
Members
Our team
We are Team:Fudan, a group of people with great diversity! Our team consists of eight dedicated members coming from myriad academic backgrounds and has a balanced female to male ratio. 2018 is our eighth year to represent our university participating in the iGEM competition, and we look forward to continuing in the years to come!
Zijie Yang
Advisor
Major in Clinical medicine
Zijie was the leader of 2017 Swords Team. He uses his experience to guide us on our project. With his assistance, we planned out a concrete schedule with every step well organized. With his practical guidance in molecular cloning, primers design, cell culture and flow data analysis, our experiments went well. He also helped us to start the FACS Jazz machine whenever we need.
Ziyan Yu
Team Leader
Major in Biology science
As one of the two captains, Ziyan is responsible for all the big and small experimental things in the team. She never complains about the hardness of the work and always motivates us to overcome our challenges. She ensures that we get everyone's job done on time. Most importantly, she genuinely cares about each of the members of the team and always makes our team atmosphere cheerful and optimistic.
Rongrong Du
Team Leader
Major in Biology Science
Rongrong is the other captain, who is in charge of human practices and serves as the channels between other iGEM teams and us. Whenever there is a disagreement between the team members, she will always come forward to resolve it. Recently, due to some personal illness, she has to stay in the hospital. However, she carefully documented all the parts (basic parts, composite parts, parts collection and optimized parts) we deposit to the BioBrick, while others were working in the lab.
Chuyue Zhang
Experiments
Major in Biology Science
Chuyue is junior, and we usually call her “little sister”. She learns fast and works tirelessly. She used to study overseas in Australia and America, and she is indispensable for the write-up of our wiki pages.
Mitchell Wan
HP and Experiments
Major in Clinical medicine
Mitchell holds a US passport but is studying in Fudan. Probably due to his early education background is different from us, he is always the person constantly curious and asking questions from fresh angles. He is a confident speaker and gave an excellent talk when we were participating the Taiwan event.
Jingbo Fu
HP and Experiments
Major in Clinical medicine
Jingbo comes from a different University, the Second Military Medical University. He joined us last winter, he likes physical exercise and we are pleased to have a fitness enthusiast with us (to protect us) . He organized the interviews and trained Qibao Dwight High School students in the summer. He maintains a healthy living habits in daily life, and very nice to have him around.
Yuyan Zeng
HP and Experiments
Major in Biology Science
Yuyan has a unique understanding and pursuit of beauty. She provides useful advice to various aspects of the project. She is pragmatic in executing her experiments and always maintains a high standard for completing them. A must-have! By the way, she made our 2-min video.
Lingwei Zhang
Modeling
Major in Data Science
Lingwei changes his major from Biology Science to Data Science, because he loves big data. He wants to solve human health problems by analyzing data. In our team, he greatly contributes to our Modelling as he is quite skilled in Matlab programming.
Fangfei Ye
Art design and HP
Major in Biology Science
Fangfei has excellent enthusiasm for art design, and her career goal is becoming a popularizer of science. In our team, she is involved in almost all parts of the project, not only art design but also HP. She is always disciplined in completing her tasks! Most importantly, she also helps maintain a lively team atmosphere!
Daru Lu
Primary PI
Professor Lu received his bachelor's degree in Bioengineering and his doctorate in Genetics. Since then, he has been studying in the fields of medical molecular genetics and human genetics. He is a vice dean of the School of Life Sciences, and helping us to secure the funding and handle other administrative matters.
Liang Cai
Primary PI
Professor Cai was born in Haining, a beautiful city located in the eastern part of China. In 2012, he started his laboratory in Fudan, mainly studying epithelial morphogenesis and actin dynamics. He has been teaching four undergraduate courses in the past 3 years, using active learning and blended learning approaches.
About our school
Fudan University, located in Shanghai, China, is one of the oldest and most prestigious universities in China. Its predecessor was founded in 1905, which was the first institution of higher education to be established by a Chinese person - Ma Xiangbo, S.J.
The university's name was chosen from the Biography of Yuxia in the Book of Documents, where the two characters fù
(meaning: return) and dàn
(meaning: dawn) are found in the famous lines “Brilliant are the sunshine and moonlight, again the morning glory after the night”.
Today, alumni of Fudan can be found in the United States, Japan, Australia, Canada, Taiwan, Hong Kong, ... all over the world. The inspiring words of Fudan have left a deep impression in the minds of the students who once were on its campus.
Our lab space
Professor Cai always encourages students to start their research early during their undergraduate study. After assembled the team, we decided to follow 2017 and carry out our iGEM project in his laboratory. His laboratory is using all modern approaches to study basic cell biology questions. With the ability to unlimitedly using a FACS Jazz machine and an epifluorescent microscope, his lab is optimal for performing our iGEM research!
Abstract
Contact-dependent signaling is critical for multicellular biological events, yet customizing contact-dependent signal transduction between cells remains challenging. Here we have developed the ENABLE toolbox, a complete set of transmembrane binary logic gates. Each gate consists of 3 layers: Receptor, Amplifier, and Combiner. We first optimized synthetic Notch receptors to enable cells to respond to different signals across the membrane reliably. These signals, individually amplified intracellularly by transcription, are further combined for computing. Our engineered zinc finger-based transcription factors perform binary computation and output designed products. In summary, we have combined spatially different signals in mammalian cells, and revealed new potentials for biological oscillators, tissue engineering, cancer treatments, bio-computing, etc. ENABLE is a toolbox for constructing contact-dependent signaling networks in mammals. The 3-layer design principle underlying ENABLE empowers any future development of transmembrane logic circuits, thus contributes a foundational advance to Synthetic Biology.