Difference between revisions of "Team:UESTC-China/Collaborations"

It was the most fantastic thing that we have a spark with NCKU-Tainan of making use of our side product as well as solving their problems of xylose resource. Straw was a bio waste in agriculture while it wasn't easy to decompose. Our work successfully solved this problem with synthetic biology. We degrading straw into useful raw materials, which are glucose, xylose, ferule acid, and lignin. In addition, we aimed to convert glucose into butanol and hydrogen. But it still remains some problems of making use of our side product. Fortunately, the team, NCKU-Tainan contact with us and searching for solutions together. We also find that they met some problem during cost evaluation and carbon footprint when designing the whole CO2 utilization system.

So they came up with the idea of combining our project together and end up building a completely eco-friendly system with negative carbon footprint. Xylose is one of the side product produced of us during straw degradation, it can be extracted and utilized in their system. At the same time, concerning the synthesis of xylose may produce greenhouse gas and chemicals, they would like to obtain xylose produced via biological method. So they can integrate their system at the downstream of our system.

Through our collaboration, we can not only produce bioenergy, but have another powerful application in CO2 emission problem. NCKU-Tainan also provided us a valuable application way and helped us design a draft of device. Meanwhile, the xylose source from straw was really important to their E. coli CO2 utilization system which changed the positive carbon footprint into negative carbon footprint. This collaboration solved both the energy problem and environment problem.

We has developed cooperative relationship with NEFU_China. We have reached an agreement of helping examine the effectiveness of carrier. First, they cloned EGFP cDNA from pEGFPN2 vectors using NheI and BamHI. Second, we used EcoRI and NheI to cut pesc-trp plasmid, and then we inserted the EGFP sequence and pFUS1 into pesc-trp plasmid to complete the construction of pFUS1-EGFP carrier.

UESTC_China used EcoRI and BamHI to cut the pFUS1-EGFP carrier, they helped us to verify the correctness of pFUS1-EGFP carrier.

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We collaborate with BNU-China to optimize the project each other. During our experiment we found that the adhE gene which leads to the production of ethanol is competitive to butanol production in their synthetic pathway. So BNU-China give us their assistance in knocking out the adhE gene with their project. This year they are making effort in applying synthetic biology methods, constructing a novel pathway to screen mutants by giving target strains growth advantages. Therefore, they provides us their technical guidance for crisper cas9 and plasmids we need, as well as helping us design primers. At the same time we help them with their repeating experiment in detecting optimal concentration and optimal induction time of salicylic acid-induced expression.

We helped our friends, UESTC-software established their team. This is the time they participate in iGEM again after a year. We help them re-learn the criteria and tell them about the precautions in registration and so on.

Their project this year is BioMaster, an integrated bio-brick database with the function of promoter prediction. They improved and standardized the information of bio-bricks in iGEM Registry and offers more user-friendly searching methods. Besides, they provided a promoter prediction tool, in which promoter sequences can be found in unlabeled gene sequences.

We were asked to use some data in their database BioMaster in wet-lab experiment and in this way we could test the data in their database. We also gave them some appropriate suggestions and feedback to assist the construction of their project. They also helped us collect experimental statistics by using their database BioMaster.

We have problems of lack of equipment on InterLab, so we turn to SCU-China for related equipment. They give us warmly help and instruct us not only in the way of using their equipment but also in analyses of our experimental data. With the help of SCU-China, we finally succeeded in our experiment of InterLab and received such a good result.

This year, we aims at using a bifunctional enzyme, xyn10D-fae1A, to directly break down the lignin-polysaccharide crosslink between straws and convert them into useful chemical materials. We introduced a group of cellulases (cex, cenA, xyl3A) to convert the cellulose produced by straw degradation into glucose, and then designed two pathways to ferment glucose to produce butanol and hydrogen respectively.

However, there is a problem that when the conventional E. coli BW25113 is used as a chassis organism for butanol fermentation, the yield is very low, so we hope to replace the chassis cells to reach an increase in the yield of butanol.

Through the discussions between our two teams, Jiangnan offered our team E. coli B0016-050 from their laboratory as a new chassis cell to help us make further increase in the yield of butanol.

We mentored a new team, CSU-China. We contact with members of CSU_CHINA through a meeting after we came back from Boston last year. We took them to an in-depth understanding of the iGEM competition, mentoring them on establishing a team and registration, as well as telling them a series of precautions. With our help, they join in the iGEM and set up their own team this year.

We held a lecture at Chengdu No.4 High School and give them a total introduction on iGEM. We help them know about iGEM and explained how to set up teams and how to register the competition in detail. This year, the school established their 2018 iGEM team, CDHSU-CHINA. Since then, we have been guiding them how to fulfill the criteria and giving instruction to them when deciding on their project.