Team:XMU-China/Judging

Gold Medal

Integrated Human Practices

This year, our program focuses on the safety in food production. Considering the local situation and brainstorming in the team, we decided to solve the problem of herbicide residues in tea production.

First of all, we interviewed the practitioners in different production links in the tea industry, and they provided valuable opinions for the design and implementation of our project.

Moreover, in the process of project design, we exchanged views with professionals from universities and government departments, covering different fields such as biology, environment and ecology, and mathematics. At the same time, we also kept close contact with other universities and share a lot of valuable information.

Then, in order to integrate our project into the society and promote the ideas and methods of synthetic biology, we conducted public education on synthetic biology through offline activities and distributed questionnaires related to the subject through online channels.

In the process of all the above activities, we have ensured the information security of the participants according to the guidance of professionals.

In the whole HP activity, every step complements each other and forms an organic whole. You can click here to see more details.

Improvement of an Existing Part

We improved the part BBa_K1334002. We added several new basic and composite parts to confirm the new system's function. You can click here to see more details.

Project Modeling

Our project aims to detect and degrade the Glyphosate. We build models to design and predict it. Firstly, we build the ODEs model to study the dynamics of the detection system. Then we run the parameter scan and find out the calibration curve of the detection system, which makes the system friendly to use.

Secondly, we design the PhnJ with the top-down strategy by adding the binding affinity and check all the mutations with the bottom-up strategy: the F2ARTP algorithm which combines Monte Carlo sampling and reinforcement learning is designed to evaluate one of two hydrogen atom transform events that happened during the reaction while the other is checked by classical molecular dynamics. What's more, the QM/MM method is used to simulate the break of the C-P bound which is catalytic by PhnJ.

Finally, we build another ODEs model for kill switches and demonstrate both in detection and degradation systems.

You can see all of our models here.

Proof of Concept

Through the design of the final loop, we demonstrated some of the results we hoped to get when we originally designed the project, which you can find on our Proof of Concept page

Partnership

Because of the global outbreak of COVID-19, the style of communication changes a lot. Our team members participated in the iGEM Southern China Regional Meeting which was held online by Shenzhen University this year. The meeting attracted a dozen teams from south China to introduce their project design and prompted us to establish contact with some other teams after the meeting. We held several online meetings with CSU-China after the iGEM Southern China Regional Meeting in the design of experiments, modeling and human practices.

As we hope to construct an innovative project, this communication encouraged us to explore in a new field through brainstorming. The meeting was a great impetus for us to turn our attention to the study of “An-tea Glyphosate” using synthetic biology. It is supposed to be beneficial to the development and improvement of our projects in the long run. For more details about our parts, you can visit our Partnership page

Science Communication

We firmly believe communication with society is a fundamental pillar for Science Communication, a way to build bridges to link science to society. Despite the efforts and sacrifices scientists and researchers have made in the name of science, we realized there is still so much misunderstanding and knowledge gap from the public. As fellow researchers, we felt it our responsibility to engage with the society and show them first-hand, be it through introducing synthetic biology or our project, the reason we are doing this. For more details about our Science Communication, you can visit our Science Communication page.

Excellence in Another Area

For more details about our Excellence in Another Area, you can visit our Excellence in Another Area page

Silver Medal

Engineering Success

This year XMU-China have tackled and solved one or more of our project's problems and use synthetic biology tools to generate expected results. Our project contains three systems: detection system, degradation system and kill switches system.

After brainstorming and design improving through literature analysis and Human Practices(See the Human Practices details inhttps://2020.igem.org/Team:XMU-China/Human_Practices), we found several enzymes candidates. Totally, 103 new BioBricks were designed for our project(See the Parts and Design details in https://2020.igem.org/Team:XMU-China/Parts and https://2020.igem.org/Team:XMU-China/Design).

We have done a lot of amazing work to make sure that they can realize the goals we set. Moreover, it is worth mentioning that BBa_K3332006, BBa_K3332011 and BBa_K3332028 are typical among them. These three BioBricks work well to perform their functions and works as expected. All data related are recorded here. We hope they will make some contribution to the iGEM community. For more details about our parts, you can visit our Engineering Success page .

Collaboration

Collaboration not only on project suggestions, but also for human practice and helping them as we could. You can click here to see more details.

Human Practices

Based on reasonable social investigation methodology, We conducted several human practice projects around our project and synthetic biology like literature search, interviews and intercollegiate communications. You can click here to see more details.

Proposed Implementation

This year, we focused on providing a convenient solution for institutions and individuals in the tea product industry chain to analyze glyphosate residues in tea product, so that those who do not have professional biologic and chemistry knowledge can monitor the “health status” of their tea product just like people measure their blood pressure with an automatic sphygmomanometer at their home.

Beyond analysis of glyphosate residues, we extend our goal to help farmers more quickly degrade the glyphosate that may remain in the tea garden through synthetic biology strategy. Once our terminal users found glyphosate residue in their sample exceed the maximum residue limit allowed, they could boot the glyphosate degradation equipment to “purify” the soil for tea growing.

You can click hereto see more details.

Bronze Medal

Competition Deliverables

We have or will meet all deliverables on the Competition Deliverables page.

Attributions

We have created a separated page on our wiki showing the attribution of each aspect clearly. You can click here to see more details.

Project Description

We have documented how we were inspired and finally selected our project on the “Project Description” page, and we also introduced how we originally achieved our goals. You can click here for more details.

Contribution

Our project uses part of the previous year, so we chose to characterize the previous BioBrick parts as our contribution in characterization. We completed the quantitative experimental characterization of BBa_K1096002,BBa_Q04510and added the data to the corresponding Biobrick. You can click here for more details.