Team:OUC-China/Human Practices

Team OUC-China: Main

Human Practices

Silver

Safety

1.Biosafety considerations and investigation for our project
Having identified our project, we discussed the bio-safety of our project with professor Liang who have worked for years on nucleic acid detection and bio-sensor. We discussed with professor Liang on the safety and feasibility of our project . For the safety of our project, our experimental strain is E.coli DH5 Alpha, a very common strain in biological experiments. As long as we do experiments according to microbial and molecular experimental operation specification., there will be no safety issues. For the feasibility of our project, designing different structures of hairpin and enzyme to regulate the expression of the gene of interest is very useful for the future work.

2.Biosafety Project
Because the track of our project is foundational advances, the downstream product have nothing but fluorescent proteins which act as reporter to characterize our experimental results. What’s more, nonpathogenic bacteriaE.coli DH5 Alpha is employed as the main chassis for our prior design on the DNA sequence, stem-loop and enzyme. As a matter of fact, when using hairpins and csy4 enzyme to tune the expression of genes, it is relatively safe for industrialized applications and scientific research. In our project, all the parts we have utilized are selected from Risk Group 1, none of which are with a Red Flag. As for microbial organisms, the microbial organisms has no chances to escape from our laboratory because we use ultraviolet sterilization after finishing our experiments. Furthermore, all the equipments used for recombination strains will be sterilized by High-Pressure Steam Sterilization Pot.

3.Biosafety lab work
Our cautiousness about experiments makes it even impossible for classis to escape. Every week, we do a thorough laboratory cleaning, including spraying alcohol and disinfectant to sterilize. Every day we check all the instruments and strains in our lab. Due to lack of enough nutrition, recombinant strains cannot survive outside the lab. And we are certain that everything we do is under our control. Every week, the teacher responsible for laboratory safety checks our safety work every week.

Fig1. We have strict safety regulations and safe operation

4.Biosafty education
We organize a summer camp to help students who have just entered university or are about to enter the university to know about biology, teach them basic microbial experimental operations such as butterfly specimens, microbial painting, and plasmid extraction. More importantly, we explain the safety of laboratories to them before entering the laboratory, raising their biosafty awareness. No experiment carries no risk to the experimenters, so we must learn to protect ourselves. Before each experiment, they are educated to be equipped with some necessary facilities, such as latex gloves, nitrile gloves, goggles, lab coats to protect them from biotic and abiotic hazards. Undoubtedly, safety is always in the first place for us.
See more details about safety in our safety page

Fig1. We have strict safety regulations and safe operation

Establish links between project and stakeholders

1. Integration with labs
The purpose of our project is to regulate the expression of a target gene with the help of miniToe structure which is composed of endoribonuclease Cys4 and hairpin. Initially, we just want to realize the regulation of gene expression. By establishing dialogues with labs, we found the limitations of our thoughts. Enlighted by Professor Liang in Ocean university of China and Professor Du in Institiue of microbiology, we changed our initial thoughts and extended the expression gradient of target gene by model prediction and mutation of hairpins and Cys4. For further application, we applied our minToe to polycistron with the help of model.
See more details in our Gold & integrated human practice.

2. integration with biosafety companies
The best way to further verify the practical application of our project is to investigate in the biological company who are good at transforming basic research into practical results . We go to some relevant local biotech-companies to interview stakeholders and tell them about our project, such as BGI, Qingdao Bright Moon Seaweed Group Co. LTD, Qingdao youdu biotechnology Co. LTD. From their perspective, these companies give us some opinions and references. After learning about the design of our project, they applauded our ideas and proposed some application of our project on production. Enlightened by the investigation, we ensure our ideas of applying our system to polycistronic expressions and put it into practice.
See more details in our Gold & integrated human practice.

Fig. We went to biotech companies and it really inspired us.

3. integration with other iGEM teams
In ccic(Conference of China iGEMers Community), we communicated with other teams about our project. XJTU-China came to exchange their ideas with us. We found that we two teams can be integrated. Having realized polycistron system, we integrated it with their project. In the process of human practice, we establish a platform with stakeholders for long term cooperation and feedback. Our project is a great example of fundamental research being transformed into application. So we share our experience with other teams and documented for future iGEMers. Apart from that, we share our experience with other teams who also do some fundamental advances and form a fundamental research group with other five teams.
See more details in our Gold & integrated human practice.

Meet up

1. co-organizer of ccic, Conference of China iGEMers Community
Served as a co-organizer, OUC-CHINA tried their best to help the organizers Shanghaitech hold the conference successfully. For the conference preparation, We are responsible for contacting each team, sending a questionnaire to them and investigating the commands of each team for the meeting. Then we organized and summarized all information of 62 teams. At each key time we remindeded each team to submit project summary, team logo then sorted out according to the track. As an old team, OUC-China actively participate in After iGEM activities and share our team heritage and experience with other teams.
As a part of the joint iGEM session, OUC-China joined the CCiC Executive Committee and worked with the members of the Executive Committee, organizers, sponsors to plan the conference and contribute to the CCiC heritage. Shanghaitech https://2018.igem.org/Team:ShanghaiTech/Collaborations

We are the co-organizer of CCiC