Partnership
—— with 2020 TPR_China
【June】 At the beginning of proposal stage, the team members of SHSBNU_China and TPR_China had discussions about locust plague and decided to treat this devastating disaster together. We set up different designs: SHSBNU_China wanted to degrade the aggregation pheromone guaiacol and serotonin to avoid locust swarm development, while TPR_China designed to synthesis specific locust aggregation pheromone 4-Vinylanisole to attract locusts to help biological treatment methods. As a beginning, we started a great partnership.
【July】 SHSBNU_China and TPR_China shared the same lab during the completion of the project, team members communicated with each other. We provided TPR_China the vector pSB4K5 to construct DMPR sensor and PAAX sensor. In the summer, TPR_China interviewed Dr. Le Kang, who is one of the most famous experts researching on locust in China. They helped us to send many questions to consult him，for example，”why phenomena aggregation occurred”，”how to combine locust plague control with ecological control”, etc. His feedbacks provided great suggestions for improving our project. Thanks to professor Kang and TPR_China.
【August】 While working in the lab, SHSBNU_China and TPR_China hold the game of organizing pipettes and extracting DNA, all the members enjoyed it.
【October】 Towards the end of the experiment, we had some cooperation on the experiments. TPR_China constructed some aromatic sensors, that could test the concentration of our team‘s guaiacol. We hoped to use their NAHR sensor to detect the function of our guaiacol degrading enzyme system.
Experiments detail: Pre-inoculum of PSB4K5_pTac_CYP_FR strains and control PSB4K5 strains were cultured overnight in M9 medium with 10 g/L glucose at 30 °C with orbital shaking at 220 rpm. Guaiacol assimilation experiments were carried out in 250 mL shake flasks with 150 mL of M9 medium and 1.5 ml inoculum in the same conditions described for the pre-inoculum with guaiacol 5 mM . Aliquots were withdrawn regularly for measurement of optical density at 600 nm (OD600) .Then we used TPR_China’ NAHR sensor analysis of the concentration of guaiacol.
After the reaction with NAHR Senor of TRP team, which is a sensor that can sense small aromatic molecules, the higher the fluorescence value was, the higher the guaiacol was, and the overall trend of our curve was downward, more details can be seen in our page：https://2020.igem.org/Team:SHSBNU_China/Proof_Of_Concept
【Future】 In the future, we would like to apply these two projects to actual locust control and protect global food security by the means of synthetic biology.
