Team:WHU-China/Attributions
What We Accomplished
General Support
Project Support And Advisors
Fundraising Help And Advice
Lab Support
Difficult Technique Support
Human Practices Support
Organization Support
iGEMer Support
Others
Proudly we have passed through all those difficult days! We do have a synthetic biology course in our school, but unfortunately none of our team members have learned it as it is the first year the course starts (so the course materials may not be available online as well). So, we all obtain knowledge about synthetic biology from books, literatures videos, and iGEM website of course. We actually started brainstorming early this year (in January) and continued to improve the several ideas we put forward. However, unable to return to school, we didn’t determine our project with our PIs until April, when we hold several meetings online. And we devoted all our energy to it then. Unfortunately, we can only make progress on the project in our homes as we still couldn’t come back to school and we actually began our experiments in September when we came back. It was a hard time but we still tried our best. And we are grateful to all the people and institutions that provide help to us sincerely.
By brainstorm and looking through literature and some former projects of other teams, we have finally made our project “The Negotiator”! We have designed a system containing two modules—“quenching module” and “sensing module” which can express quorum quenching enzymes to degrade AHLs and chemokines to attract immune cells to kill the pathogens. Besides putting forward the idea, we also made a lot of efforts in other aspects to realize our project, including building the hardware to realize the simple co-culture in-vitro, modeling our system and optimizing our enzyme, doing human practices activities and collaborating with other teams and so on. Proudly, we make the wiki and practice our presentation all by ourselves. For more specific achievements you can look through other pages of our wiki. And for each member’s contribution you can also see our Team Member part.
We also listed our team members’work below:
Dingchen Yu--- thinks of the idea “the negotiator” first and decides the several modules we need. Conducts the cell-free quorum sensing experiments and participates in human practices activities. Organizes the whole team and so on.
Yipeng Xie---responsible for the quenching module, looks through literatures and finds data of AiiC, AiiO and PvdQ. Designs and conducts the experiments. Participates in the work of human practices and model partially and connects with our PIs and so on.
Jiayang Li---responsible for the design and process of the graphs and videos, including our team logo, promotion video and poster and so on. Participates to find literatures of quenching module and conducts the experiments together. Joins the visit to Prof. Daichang Yang.
Haoyu Zheng---manages the whole wet lab work, including buying experimental materials and connecting all team’s experiments. Responsible for the design and experiments of sensing module(including TEV protease and activators). Collects all of our new parts and submit them to the Registry.
Shichen Tang---Responsible for the design and experiments of chemokine and TA modules, including Transwell tests and so on. Participates in construction of quorum dynamics model and interviews to several professors and Zhaotang Ma.
Simin Ouyang: Responsible for organizing all our human practices work. Writes most of the articles of human practices.
Luyang Li: Designs our co-culture hardware, the protocol of the co-culture experiments and participates in the cell biology related experiments.
Yangwenhui Xu---Responsible for all the hardware design. Designs the microfluidic chip and connects with company to improve it. Uses 3D printing to make part of the chip device.
Boxuan Xia--- Participates in hardware construction. Responsible for our wiki design. Contributes to human practices work as well.
Kaiyu Qiu---Responsible for all the models construction. Builds the gro language model, ancestral protein reconstruction and structural analysis models and so on.
Tianwei Gan---Builds the biofilm model and does the numerical analysis on the quorum dynamics model and so on.
Yuqing Liu---Participates in graphical art works, designs and makes illustrations.
Yuxin Qi---Responsible for building and improving our wiki pages
Xiaowen Shang---Responsible for building and improving our wiki pages
Liran Mao---Responsible for implementation and entrepreneurship, including making the business plan and so on. Participates in the experiments of sensing module and some model work.
Fengming Chen--- Participates in the experiments of quenching module. Participates in some work of entrepreneurship group.
Chaodong Zhang--- Participates in the cell biology related and TA related experiments. Contributes to the entrepreneurship and human practices work, including writing several articles of our interviews.
Ruishi Zhong--- Participates in sensing module’s experiments. Contributes to the business plan and human practices work, including recording our visit to Dr, Zhiyong Peng.
Wuhan University provides the opportunity for us to attend iGEM. And as a comprehensive university, Wuhan University makes it possible to make our team an interdisciplinary one. Our team members come from College of life Sciences, Hongyi Honor College, School of Mathematics and Statistics, School of Computer Sciences, School of Electrical Engineering and Automation, School of Stomatology and School of Urban Design.
Primary PI
Prof.Yu Chen
Secondary PI
Prof.Zhixiong Xie
Secondary PI
Prof.Tiangang Liu
Prof. Xiaolian Zhang
Prof. Qiuping Zhang
Prof. Pu Chen
Prof. Zhiyong Peng
Dr. Zhaotang Ma
Prof. Daichang Yang
To improve the practicability of our project, we interviewed several experts either online or offline. From Prof. Xiaolian Zhang and Prof. Qiuping Zhang we learnt a lot about the characteristics of chemokines and inflammation and got a lot of suggestions to alter our project in a more practical way. From Dr. Zhiyong Peng we got plenty of information on the clinical situation of VAP. From Prof. Pu Chen we got suggestions on how to design a microfluidic chip suitable for our project effectively. From Zhaotang Ma and Prof. Daichang Yang we learned several aspects of how to transfer our achievements into practice (focusing on laws and procedures separately) which improves the possibility of implementation of our engineering probiotics. We appreciate all the information we got from these experts and a certain amount of approval they showed. You can see detailed attribution in Integrated HP.
Helvécio Cardoso Corrêa Póvoa, Chianca G C , Natalia Lopes Pontes Póvoa Iorio. COVID-19: An Alert to Ventilator-Associated Bacterial Pneumonia[J]. Infectious Diseases and Therapy, 2020.—Inspire us to solve the problem of VAP
Vipin Chandra Kalia and Hemant J. Purohit, Quenching the quorum sensing system: potential antibacterial drug targets, Critical Reviews in Microbiology, 2011; 37(2): 121–140—Inspire us to use quorum quenching enzymes to inhibit the virulence of pathogens
Fetzner, Susanne. Quorum quenching enzymes[J]. Journal of Biotechnology, 2015, 201:2-14.—Provide us the information of a variety of quorum quenching enzymes
2019 SUSTech Shenzhen: https://2019.igem.org/Team:SUSTech_Shenzhen--Provide us the idea of using chemokines to attract immune cells and kill pathogens
2007 Cambridge: https://2007.igem.org/Cambridge--Provide us the data of an activator system
Small airway-on-a-chip enables analysis of human lung inflammation and drug responses in vitro—Provide us the basic pattern of constructing a microfluidic chip
Silverman AD et al., Cell-free gene expression: an expanded repertoire of applications. Nat. Rev. Genetics, 21 (2020): 151-170.—Provide us information on cell-free expression increasing the rate of DBTL cycle
Michael Chui, Matthias Evers, James Manyika, Alice Zheng, and Travers Nisbet :The Bio Revolution: Innovations transforming economies, societies, and our lives [R].McKinsey Global Institute,May 13, 2020-Inspire us on our business plan and provide us with some data
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Prof. Shuqiang Huang from SIAT, Chinese Academy of Sciences-- Provide us Escherichia coli Nissle 1917 for our experiments
Senior iGEMers Tianyi Chang, Renjie Zhou, Yiru Shen, Jiongyi He, Liangyue Song, Shunqing Tan -- Give us help among all kinds of aspects of our project.
Dorothy Zhang --Help us to understand several rules of iGEM, especially about the promotion video.
We appreciate the funds College of Life Sciences provides for us!
College of Life Sciences, Wuhan University--Provide us with a science training lab to conduct our molecular biology experiments.
Prof. Tiangang Liu’s Lab, College of Pharmacy, Wuhan University--Allow us to conduct the cell-free sensing part experiments in his lab and provide us enough materials and instructions.
Prof. Xiaodong Zhang’s lab, College of Life Sciences, Wuhan University--Allow us to conduct all of the cell biology related experiments in his lab and provide us enough materials and instructions to help us test the efficiency of our chemokines.
Prof. Zhixiong Xie’s lab, College of Life Sciences, Wuhan University--Provide several experimental materials for us when we were badly in need of them.
Teacher Yan Long, Researcher Mingyuan Yang, Teacher Jing Che, Teacher Xiaoyan Li -- Provide us enough experimental conditions and help us solve all kinds of problems during our experiments.
Graduate students Shiyu Teng, Ao Gong, Xingchen Dong, Qipeng Shu, Liu Ran, Mu Xin and Jie Chen—Teach us some experimental skills and help us solve experimental problems.
Wuhan University Testing Center, teacher Ran Zhang and teacher Jianshe He—Provide us HPLC and helps us quantify our AHL samples.
Because of the severe pandemic, our human practices activities were mainly conducted with several experts from Wuhan University and a few experts who don’t. These experts have been mentioned above actually. Again we sincerely appreciate Prof. Xiaolian Zhang, Prof. Qiuping Zhang and Prof. Pu Chen from School of Basic Medical Sciences, Prof. Zhiyong Peng from Zhong Nan Hospital of Wuhan University, Dr. Zhaotang Ma from China Medical City and Prof. Daichang Yang from State Key Laboratory of Hybrid Rice for their advice which really helps us improve the availability of our project.
Local artist Claire—Help us finish our popular science comics which spread our project to public
IDT—Help us in DNA synthesis.
GenScript --Help us in DNA synthesis.
Emulate—Help us modify our design of microfluidic chip which makes it more suitable to our project.
Benchling--- Provides us a platform to store our gene information and conduct molecular design.
Sangon Biotech—Help us do primer synthesis and DNA sequencing.
CCTCC—Provide us HL-60 and THP1 cell lines for our cellular experiments.
We appreciate these iGEM teams a lot because they either share new ideas with us to help our project improve or provide us experiment materials. We made good friends with these teams in 2020 iGEM competition! You can learn specific help in collaboration.
Our classmates Haowen Tan, Yutong Zhou—Provide us equipment for our video and help us edit it. respectively.
Senior student Ziyun Zhai—Take both team and individual photos for our team.
All of our team members’ families, relatives, classmates, and friends or others who participate in the group interviews or do our questionnaires.
