Team-iGEM SJTU BioX 201

Laboratory--Integrated

For our project design, we communicated with teachers in different fields.

We contacted Professor Zhang Hepeng from the School of Physics and Astronomy, SJTU. Professor Zhang is mainly engaged in the research of biophysics and biomechanics. He is very interested in our projects, especially bio-storage. He introduced us to the current developments in the field of physical storage, especially the latest quantum storage technology. He believes that the existing disk storage technology has been relatively developed, and has obvious advantages in terms of storage density, reading speed, production cost, and ease of use. Although the potential storage density of DNA storage can greatly exceed the magnetic storage limit, its production cost is too high, and physicists are also trying to use quantum storage to further increase the storage density. However, he believes that our CRISPR storage is still a very meaningful attempt. He believes that bio-storage does not have to focus on disk storage, but should use its bio-affinity to open up new applications, such as recording environmental data, monitoring human intestinal conditions, or storing some data in artificial organs. He also shared with us some of his insights into cross-scientific research, pointing out that biology is moving toward quantitative direction and encouraging us to continue our efforts.

We had an exchange with Professor Xu Heng from the School of Physics and Astronomy, SJTU as well. Professor Xu has long been engaged in the research of biophysics and quantitative biology. Different from professor Zhang, He believes that bio-storage is a very promising field. As an emerging technology, bio-storage is at a disadvantage in terms of technology and cost in the early stage of development, but its development potential is huge. In particular, he pointed out that sequencing technology is developing rapidly, and the development bottleneck of DNA storage is mainly in DNA synthesis. Traditional DNA chemical synthesis takes a long time and high costs, and the future development direction should be the biosynthesis of DNA. Our CRISPR storage project using Cas1/2 protein to insert a PAM sequence into a plasmid can be seen as a prototype of DNA biosynthesis. If we can achieve continuous and selective insertion of different PAM sequences, a kind of DNA biosynthesis (using small fragments instead of single nucleotide as the basic unit) can be realized. In the future, DNA storage technology using spacer fragments as storage units can also be developed.

At first we prefer to choose sequencing as the method to read the information we recorded. The communication with two professors in physics made us rethink about the biostorage. We finally gave up using sequencing as a means of reading information, and determinated to use fluorescence as a report. Therefore, the biggest advantage of our comparison with traditional DNA storage is that it can realize the instant storage and reading of information without DNA synthesis and sequencing. Besides, according to professor Xu, the process of recording in our design can also be regarded as a method of DNA biosynthesis in laboratory.

We also had an exchange with Associate Professor Tao Fei from the School of Life Science and biotechnology, SJTU. Mr Tao Fei is mainly engaged in the research of synthetic biology and metabolic engineering. He introduced us to some basic conditions of the current market transformation of synthetic biology products. Today's synthetic biological products are rarely put into the market, mainly in comparison with chemical production. The scale of biosynthesis is small, and the market cost is high, which makes it less competitive. Now the state has also introduced various policies to support the development of the synthetic biology industry. For example, the first phase of the 13th Five-Year Plan has funded 36 projects.

Understanding the current state of application in the synthetic biology market, we believe that our project should be tilted toward the application side. Therefore, based on off-target signal detection and reporting, we focus on expanding the application space of the storage part of the project and developing it into a universal bio-storage device.

We also invited Professor Tang Kexuan from the College of Agriculture and Biology to give us a lecture on the development of synthesis biology which give us some guidance and advice on the molecular cloning operation of the project.

Team:SJTU-BioX-Shanghai/Human Practices/hp-laboratory

Laboratory--Integrated