Source of inspiration
Plant natural products are the focus of research and development in recent years, and the research direction of two instructors in our team is related to plant natural products. We listened to the teacher's lecture in winter training, so we know more about plant natural products than other substances. In the course of investigating all kinds of plant natural products, we found that flavonoid is important plant natural products, which has good medicinal value. They are also precursor molecules of many substances. At the beginning of the project, COVID-19 outbreak, and we found that flavonoid also antibacterial and antiviral activities. therefore, we chose flavonoid as our synthetic products.
There are many types of flavonoid. In order to produce flavonoid through fermentation industry, We need to investigate the metabolic pathways of a compound. There are several students in our team from Yunnan and Sichuan, which are rich in lemons . There is a substance in lemons called eriodictyol. The content of eriodictyol in lemon is high and so far no scholars have used industrial fermentation to produce it. So we chose eriodictyol as the final synthetic product.
During the research, in order to better understand the fermentation industry, our team visited a liquorice manufacturer in Xinjiang, China. Visited the biological fermentation workshop under construction, and had a better understanding of the fermentation industry. At the same time, in the process of communicating with the head of the factory, he pointed out that our project is very challenging and needs to control a lot of parameters. It is necessary to try through computer simulation and modeling, then test and pilot, expand the scale and so on. This is very meaningful for the promotion and implementation of our project.
Experiment
Because of the COVID-19 outbreak, we could not finish the experiment. This year we only co-cultured E. coli with yeast. We also conducted three groups of comparative experiments to verify the necessity of co-culture and to find the optimum ratio between the two chassis strains.
Model
We can not finish the experiment, so we build a model to verify the feasibility of the experiment. Because of the large number of project modules, we build three modules. They are QS model, co-culture model and model to analyze the relationship between co-culture and QS. The three models work independently to a certain extent and interact with each other to fit our project completely. Through computer simulation and modeling, it can reduce the problems existing in the design, reduce the difficulty of the experiment, and help to realize industrialization.
We are going to choose two-phase. We will finish the unfinished experiment next year. Through experiments to solve the existing problems in the current project, try to achieve industrial production.
Our goal is
1. Construct a stable co-culture system that can interact with QS system
2. Pay a return visit to CoFCO and other enterprises next year to gain recognition from professionals in relevant fields
3. Constructing a complete co-cultivation model can provide help for the team to explore co-cultivation in the future