Team:Shanghai High School/Demonstrate

The characterization protein and early diagnosis of cervical cancer

Here we demonstrate specific protein expression variations related to NFX1 over-expression, a gene found to be closely associated with cervical cancer.

Demonstrate

Our team’s topic is that an RNA thermometer to determine the temperature that whether the temperature is higher We employ this method to ensure that the vaccine is valid and safe to inject to the people, and make a breakthrough which rules out the traditional method - vaccine vial monitor. This method has some disadvantages: long reaction period, accumulated temperature, and difficulty of noticing the color change. In this case, our team innovate a new method to determine the temperature of the vaccine-RNA thermometer. RNA thermometer is a special sequence that contains fluorescent protein sequence (Green fluorescent protein,GFP, we used in our project). The special structure of RNA called hairpin structure is that we use it to control the temperature of translating protein. At the low temperature, hairpin structure will not stretch into a row, which means that GFP will not be translated and the color of vaccine will maintain the same as before. In contrast, if the temperature is higher than the temperature for safe storage of vaccine, then hairpin structure stretches; ribosomes bind on the ribosome binding sites; GFP will be translated to fluorescent protein immediately. Thus, the color of vaccine will be green which can warn people the vaccine can not be used.
Through our experiment and improvement, when people need to inject the vaccine in the future, the medical institutions will immediately find out whether the vaccine can be used. Our team ultimately experimented with whether RNA thermometer was turned on from 20 to 40 degrees Celsius, and successfully obtained controllable protein sequences at various temperatures for different RNA thermometers according to different storage temperatures of vaccines. Our team designs the product to be a kind of sticker, pasted on the outside of vaccine bottle or medicine bottle, small, low cost. The sticker is divided into two parts. One part is our product, RNA thermometer. The other part is T7 promoter, which is used to start the reaction. The reaction can be carried out by mixing the two substances, and the operator can quickly observe the results of the experiment.

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