Team:SZU-China/Achievement
Achievement
BRONZE
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1. Registered for iGEM, had a great iGEM season, and attended the Giant Jamboree.
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2. All Deliverables met!
#1 Wiki
#2 Poster
#3 Presentation
#4 Judging Form -
3. Attributions finished!(click Attribution to see more)
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4. Project Inspiration and Description finished! (click Description to see more)
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5. Existing Part from the Registry of Standard Biological Parts has been characterized using our new approach. (Added quantitative experimental characterization data, click BBa_K314200 to see more)
SILVER
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1. Validated Part - Standard Tracks finished! (click BBa_K2912017, BBa_K2912011, BBa_K2912016 to see our submitted new parts related to our project this year.)
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2. Validated Contribution - Special Tracks also finished! (click Software and Application to see more)
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3. Finished Collaborations. (click Collaborations to see how we helped each other!)
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4. Silver Human practices finished, welcome to our Human Practices.
GOLD
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1. Integrated Human Practices: Promote our designs to the world and try to solve practical problems with our designs. (click Integrated Human Practices for more information!)
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2. Improved previous part (BBa_K117000), and click BBa_K2912015 to see the improved new part!
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3. Utilized mathematical model for instruction in our lab. (click Model for more information!)
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4. Demonstrated our project. (welcome to our Demonstration!)
Our project this year is to develop a biological herbicide - Micrancide for Mikania micrantha, a dangerous invasive plant that is fast spreading in our city. We have conducted a field survey across Shenzhen city from a back-hill orchard of our campus to an isolated national nature reserve, to acquired first-hand information of Mikania micrantha, and we have designed series of simulation experiment based on the information we gathered before. We have interviewed many experts in their fields. Their specific suggestions were extracted and integrated into some significant inputs, to promote continuous facilitate improvement of our project. For establishing safety guidelines for our products, we were contacted with the local administration and government research institutes to acquire local regulations and professional guidance. We have integrated all the impacts into an interactive timeline to display how HP activities are pushing our projects forward.
In addition to the common lectures and meet-ups, we have also carried out some creative activities this year to build our bridge with the public. As our team traditions, we have released a new applet with multiple functions and distinguishing feature this year, the GREEN HUNTER. This applet can specifically identify Mikania micrantha to help the citizens to recognize this dangerous spice. Besides, the public can provide us with the location of Mikania micrantha in real-time via the distribution map provided by our applet. It has contributed a lot to our application. With the help of the applet, we have organized a few volunteer events to remove Mikania micrantha from our city. We also updated some latest progress of our project and synthetic biology on the applet. We concentrated our field research across the city into a documentary and we put it online, which will make the public more concerned about Mikania micrantha and other invasive species.
Our team could be eligible for this prize for achieving the purposes of modeling. We successfully built several models to predict the growth rate of M. micrantha if not controlled, estimate the optimum time to let E. coli self-crack, making the maximum RNAi molecules we need to flow out, evaluate the efficiency of Micrancide, the appropriate concentration of it as well as the proper period of spraying. Then, we subjected our experimental data to statistic model, giving us scientific results and helping us analyze some key parameters statistically and reveal the impact of each relative factor that influenced the application of Micrancide, according to which we could adjust the final product. During modelling, we got better understand and modified our project design by these results.
SZU-China team this year aims to develop an RNAi-based herbicide for M. micrantha, during which we are in need a fast and efficient method to report the amount of RNAi molecules inside the leaves after spraying the Micrancide, helping us better evaluate the efficiency of our product. We found a G-quadruplex DNA-based, label-free and ultrasensitive strategy for microRNA detection and compared it with Northern Blot (NB). The results showed that under the optimized conditions, this new method could detect small RNA while NB could not. Therefore, this simple and label-free strategy holds great potential in applications in biomedical research and in early clinical diagnostics. Moreover, it could replace NB and help with various RNA and DNA detection.
We would like to express our heartfelt gratitude to all the judges for your hard work! Besides, we sincerely thank everyone who gave us support!
