Team:BIT/Project/Description

<!DOCTYPE html> Background

Project Overview

Since 2015 our team has been thinking about how to apply synthetic biology to disease detection. Last year, in 2017 we developed an aptamer-based biomarker detection platform, JACOB. This year, we optimized JACOB and proposed a new solution, JACOB 2.0.

We successfully optimized last years’ JACOB system, using S-adenosylmethionine (SAM) and SAM ribose switches instead of lysine to solve the endogenous problem of lysine. In this optimization process, we rethink the signal transmission process of the system, and hope to further improve the accuracy of the system by reducing the number of signal transmissions and avoiding unnecessary losses, which promoted the birth of JACOB 2.0.

In our JACOB 2.0, we designed a microbial sensor based on the principle of nucleic acid aptamers, which specifically captures biomarker and converts signals from difficult-to-detected into fluorescent signals. Then uses our device and the microarray chip to detect the signals via smart phone.

The microbial sensor we designed consists of two parts: the aptamer and the microbial probe. The two parts are bound by base complementary pairing.

When the biomarker is captured by the aptamer, the microbial probe is decoupled.

After growth and reproduction, the detectable fluorescence is emitted, and the signal is directly converted from the biomarker signal to the fluorescent signal. There are no other losses.
Moreover, the higher the concentration of biomarker, the more engineering bacteria are decoupled and in the same culture time the fluorescence intensity will be higher, thus the system achieving quantitative detection of biomarker.

For hardware, we demonstrate a portable microarray and smartphone-based optical biosensor for high-throughput detection of biomarkers. We construct a mature microarray chip processing platform to meet various detection requirements. Meanwhile, smartphone-based optical biosensor plays a role in high-throughput diagnostics.