Overview

“Think big, Start small”

The big challenge we tried to face in the first place was to reduce the frequency of off-target gene-editing events. By talking to experts and refering to literatures, we found out that the off-target effect hinders the development of gene-editing technology, and that editing accuracy needs to be further improved when it comes to sound clinical practice.

It seems arrogant to claim that we are going to solve the problem when thousands of scientists failed to do so. Also given the fact that deaths from lung cancer outnumber any other cancers, we planned to design a system that can strongly mitigate the off-target effect of only one target, PDCD1, a non-small lung cancer-related gene. The system was then named LUCAS, which stands for Locational Unique Cas9. Results from our general social survey showed that people lack confidence in current gene-editing technology, making our project even of more significance.

What’s interesting is that as our project carried on, we realized that LUCAS would be able to be applied to other genes and optimize the Cas9 protein accordingly to improve editorial efficiency. Since LUCAS has never been used in other editing sites, it by chance echoes our slogan: “Think Big, Start Small”.

Click HERE to view integrated human practice.

The pleasure of educating

We tried to conduct education for all ages and in any form possible. We taught kids in rural areas some basic science knowledge via videotapes, and tried to teach them how to protect themselves against COVID-19. We held online as well as offline conferences to deliver a lecture on directed evolution to high school students. And we also shared literatures in the special column of our WeChat Blog. Researcher’s mental health is of our great concern as well, and we tried to summarize certain policies for them based on our own experiences.

Click HERE to view public education.

Protein Atlas

Proteins are the bricks for biological systems. Different proteins have different tertiary structures, therefore they have diverse functions. We intend to design an "atlas of proteins" to present more about the relationship between protein structure and function. Here we want to build a collection of protein maps for those well-known proteins in biological world.

Click HERE to view Protein Atlas.

Acknowledgements

SJTU-BioX-Shanghai

contact us

Contact us: sjtuigem@gmail.com or sjtuigem@gmail.com