Demonstrate

Synthetic biology is first about great ideas and practical designs. But what truly makes a project a good one is that it can be brought into reality. So our team has been working hard towards this goal throughout the whole competition season. Now we want to explain to you what effort we had done and what results we got to prove our project can actually work in reality.

In terms of experiments performed in wet lab, it consists of four parts, corresponding to four steps in our project’s colon cancer diagnosis process. First, we tested the adhesion of the engineered E.coli to the colon cancer cell lines HT29. Then, we observed gas vesicles in the cancerated tissue of mouse by ultrasound. Meanwhile we proved that the nitric oxide biosensor can react to the nitric oxide and synthesize the medicine we needed. Finally, we made sure biosafety by cell lysis, tested by plate count method.

Although we had done theses experiments listed above in our lab, from E.coli to cell lines, and mouses last to prove our project, we still can not say that our project can work functionally when it comes human body. So we stimulated the environment in human’s colon and the status of our engineered E.coli to observe these bacteria’s behaviors. What’s more, in order to make sure that even ultrasonic apparatus in normal hospitals can observe gas vesicles, that is to image the cancerous cells, we modeled the relationship between the frequency of ultrasound and the intensity of gas vesicles’ signal. The results show great possibility to make this brand diagnosis method accessible to even the most normal hospitals in a small city in China.

While we kept pushing ourself to make progress in both wet lab and dry lab, we also reached out to experts in related fields, leading enterprises, patients in hospital and general public. We’re glad that experts gave a lot of helpful advice to assist us in developing our project. International enterprises such as Roche gave us a better understanding of medicine and public’s need to the convenient, fast, cheap and noninvasive diagnosis, We’re surprised so many people are afraid of traditional diagnosis method, such as colonoscopy and such widely acceptance of brand diagnosis ways. Thus, we collaborated with 2018 iGEM team Tongji_China to make our engineered systems into a capsule, a real product, taking the first step to make this project applicable to practical use.

What’s worth our second thoughts is biosafety since our engineered bacteria is designed to be took orally by people to get to their colon and start to function. Despite the suicide mechanism we designed to prevent these engineered bacteria stay in human body, we strictly obeyed every rules and regulations approved by iGEM Safety Committee and by our country and institution. We also set up a standard to evaluate if an iGEM project is safe enough and you can see further details about biosafety in this page