We have interviewed a number of shop owners in Goldfish Market to know more about whether they are facing the problem of water containing heavy metals. We have also asked about how do they tackle the problem and the frequency of doing it.

Video Meeting with Team:Hong_Kong-CUHK

Date: 13th April

We have our first video meeting with Team:Hong_Kong-CUHK. We have briefly introduced both of our projects and exchanged some idea on it. We have also discussed the details of our collaboration, including borrowing their lab for our interlab experiment and suggesting a meetup for all Hong Kong teams that will attend iGEM this october.

Ordering of MT1A gene

Date: 14th May

We have ordered our design MT1A gene part from IDT through the provided 20 kb of DNA. Thanks IDT for the generosity so that we can reduce the cost of our projects.

Ordering of EhMT1 gene

Date: 6th June

We have ordered our design EhMT1 gene part from IDT through the provided 20 kb of DNA. Thanks IDT for the generosity so that we can reduce the cost of our projects.

Collect Water Sample from Goldfish Market

Date: 25th June

We have collected 11 sample from Goldfish Market to study the seriousness of water containing copper content in a business aspect. It is pleasure that a number of shops had cooperated with us by providing numerous water sample.

Learning of Wiki Building

Date: 4th-5th July

We have learned how to build our Wiki page from our senior members. We hope that our Wiki page can help judges and other iGEM teams to know more about our project.

Team Wiki

Date: 4th-7th July

We have started creating the wiki web page. We started creating the content for wiki. The first draft of all contents are done.

Interlab Study

Date: 17th-23th July

We have completed our interlab study in Team:Hong_Kong-CUHK’s lab. We hope that the interlab study can increase the accuracy of measuring GFP in different labs.

Assemble of DIY Colorimeter

Date: 20th-21st July

We have designed and assembled a DIY colorimeter to record the blue level out of RGB values of water samples so that we can know the absorbance of heavy metal without using a professional colorimeter. We hoped that this could help the public to measure absorbance of heavy metal in a easier way.

Wiki page list

Date: 28th July

A brief page list is created for wiki. The list listed the pages we need to create so that we can have a clear direction while creating the wiki content.

Meeting with Team:Hong_Kong_HKUST

Date: 2nd August

We have our first meeting with Team:Hong_Kong-HKUST in our school. We have exchanged our project and raised a few questions for both projects. We have also discussed some ideas in terms of biosafety.

iGEM Training Camp

Date: 3rd-5th August

We held the Joint School Biotech Training Camp 2018 from 3rd to 5th of August with the aim of training high school students to participate iGEM competition in the future. A total of eight high schools have joined the camp and students are taught with different laboratory skills such as PCR and transformation. There is also a talk by professor Chau,King Lau. We hoped the camp can introduce iGEM to the public.

Experiment

Date:15th - 20th August

We designed protocols for our wet lab. We immediately started our experiment after that.

First of all, we calibrated the colorimeter, which was the machine we used to do measurement of absorbance of copper solution and cell culture in SOB medium in our experiment, by undergoing assay 2, which will be detailedly explained in the experiment page, in order to found out the optimal wavelength of filter in colorimeter and concentration range of copper(II) sulphate aqueous solution after copper testing kit treatment.

Secondly, we underwent assay 3, which will also be detailedly explained in the experiment page, to generate a standard curve of absorbance against copper concentration, allowing us to estimate the copper concentration from the absorbance with colorimeter after adding copper test solution copper.

After then, we did assay 4 on the two successfully transformed parts BBa_K2578610(EhMT1) and BBa_K2578810(MT1A), which the process took two days. On the first day of assay 4, we grew up cell culture that will be used in the assay in SOB medium with ampicillin for 18 ours. On the second day, we put our genetically engineered bacterias and control factor empty vector bacteria into copper(II) sulphate solution, and compare their copper absorption ability my measuring the concentration of the copper(II) sulphate solutions inoculated with different experimental bacterias, with the aid of colorimeter and standard curve.

On the same day we finished doing assay 4, we did assay 5, in order to confirm that bacteria can’t pass through the kind of dialysis tubing we used to make the bacterial copper filtration device but copper ions can, as we have the responsibility to prove our product can help the bacteria inside absorb copper ions in water and won’t cause leakage of bacteria to the environment, causing pollution.

Data collection

Date: 20th August

We collected the result of the wet lab. The experimental result of assay 4 disproves our hypothesis about the enhancing ability on copper absorption of bacteria by the metallothionein in vivo expression, which it reveals that the engineered bacteria give a similar ability on copper absorption with bacteria not engineered (control experiment empty vector bacteria). Therefore, we gathered and discussed the experimental result, trying to find out the reason for the disprovement of our hypothesis, which several reasons were discussed like the fluctuation of cross-species gene expression.

Besides, the result of assay 5 confirms that the kind of dialysis tubing we used is impermeable to our engineered bacteria but permeable to copper ions, proving our device won’t cause biopollution on the environment normally and allow bacterias inside the device absorb copper ion from the aqueous environment.

Interview Experts

Date: 20th August

We have interviewed a number of experts in the aspect of aquaponics through phone to learn about the impacts of high copper concentration brings to the environment. We will like to thanks Mr. Gary Wong for helping us.

Ordering of MymT gene

Date: 27th August

We have ordered our designed MymT gene part from IDT through the provided 20 kb of DNA. Thanks IDT for the generosity so that we can reduce the cost of our projects.

Title and abstract

Date: 5th September

We have created the title and abstract for our team. The draft is corrected and uploaded.

iGEM sharing session

Date: 22th September

We have hosted a sharing session between Team Hong_Kong_JS_S,Team Hong_Kong_UST and Team HK_HCY_LFC. Each team presented their project to each other, and different teams asked questions based on their project. We hoped that this can improve the presentation at iGEM for each team.

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