Team:Shenzhen SFLS/Human Practices

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Human Practice

Introduction

To make our project responsible for the world, we organized lots of activities to connect the public and experts with our project. We have conducted some surveys to spread the idea of synthetic biology and iGEM in various ways and interviewed some researchers for further communication to imrpove our project.

2019 iGEM Southern China Regional Meeting

Our team attended the 2019 iGEM Southern China Regional Meeting at Shenzhen University on May 4 this spring. The meeting has invited twelve strong regional iGEM teams includes Sun Yat-Sen University, Shenzhen College Of International Education, and the Great-bay China. At the beginning of the meeting, the organizers invited the regional ambassador for Asia Mrs. Dorothy to deliver a speech about iGEM. She first recommended a program named After iGEM, which is an independent organization attached to the iGEM foundation. It is dedicated to connecting members of iGEM all over the world and promoting the development of synthetic biology through the integration, sharing, and innovation of the resource. Then she emphasized some changes of the rules and standards, and some fundamental factors to make a high-quality human practice program. her words gave an enormous help to us. The second part of the meeting is the project introduction. We learned a lot of interesting ideas and some ingenious designs from their presentation. Furthermore, at the Q＆A session, we heard many sincere and professional voices about our project, which pointed out our problems and showed us a way to improve the project.

Seminar with Dr.Ge and Dr.Zhang

On April 15, after several meetings, we finally needed to decide on our project between biological glue and the decomposition of plastic in the early stage of the decision-making project. Before we determined our project, we sincerely invited two unique insights in science, Dr. Ge, who has PhD degree in Stanford University, and Dr. Zhang, who has studied gene engineering for about 18 years, to take part in one of our meetings that the topic is related to some of the design schemes for the project.

Firstly, they talked about what they did for science, and then they presented the idea that gene engineering has excellent prospects and encouraged us to keep trying in iGEM competition. After they listened to our blueprint, the two doctors praised our ideas and felt that the purpose of using for biological glue is novel, which might help us determine our project more directly. Besides, the PhDs gave some suggestions on which proteins we are choosing and provided some particular areas that we need to focus on when we looked at the literature, which is of great help to our project at the beginning.

Intergrated Human Practice

Interview with Doctor Fu

To know whether our project could be responsible for the world, we visited Doctor Fu, who is a chief physician in Shenzhen Bao’an maternal and children hospital and has a master's degree in Anhui Medical University. We introduced our project and iGEM to him and showed the purpose of knowing more about the therapy of normal physical hurt. We presented the confusing aspect about how to increase the repairing ability of mgfp-5, he suggested that we can add something with the high repairing ability and mentioned two things we can do with, which are EGF and Aloe vera gel. He introduced both of them to us and praised our project that it is a fancy idea to manufacture dressing of band-aid by using gene engineering.

Question:

• 1.

  What can we do to verify our product can be suitable for the human body?

• Answer: If you cannot experiment with humans or animals, firstly, you can evaluate the BC biocompatibility of this protein to find out whether it can match to human body skin.

After we finished almost all the experiments of our project, we visited Doctor Fu the second time, and he presented a new concept about wounding the skin to help our product, which is 'Moist wound healing.' It is a new way presented of healing the wound, which is providing a wet environment for the injury. Compared with dry wound treatment, it has many advantages[1], such as better healing consequence, lower rate of inflection, Painless removal of the dressing, better cosmetic results. After searching relevant literature, we found that this method has been used in clinical therapy, and it has a good effect on healing and prospects, which may be another application of our project. Since the surveys that we conducted in the second club day(https://2019.igem.org/Team:Shenzhen_SFLS/Public_Engagement), the benefits of moist wound healing may satisfy the public, so we deliberated that it might be a decent way of applying our product.

Interview with pharmaceutical factory manager Mr.Chen

To find the appreciate form of our product, we had a communication with Mr.Chen, who is a director in Kamp Medicine, a medical factory in Foshan. We know the necessary procedure of manufacturing band-aid and ask whether our thoughts of making band-aid is available. After introducing our project and what we have done for our full item, he raised that we can think about other applications, not only the band-aid but also some other reagents. He has mentioned that there are already some researchers who study the mussel foot protein because of its excellent prospects, which is the main protein in our project.

Regarding our regular forms of application, which is manufacturing band-aid, he presented that we can produce it as the form of freeze-dried powder and gel. The reason is that the storage of protein should be in the cold condition. Otherwise, it would change its original function. However, if we keep it as the freeze-dried powder, it can avoid this complicated and necessary condition to store our product.

Questionnaire in club day

According to the survey that we released in the club day, it helped us to choose the main application that our product used for band-aid.

Our team was interested in Biological bonding at the beginning. After getting information from many aspects, including asking teachers and searching literature, we considered that all the questions in the pattern could be solved by protein that we used in our project. According to the chart, students hope it can be applied to the repair of human wounding. Compared with the literature we already searched, we thought that it is a pretty good idea. Thus, our design was decided finally.

Questionnaire for the presentation

According to the survey that we put for the forum, we found that the public is used to use the form of bandage in the past, so we present this idea when we visit the medicine factory manager for the further exploration of application.

To decide the final form of our project, we provided this question to the students. It’s obvious to see that students are more tend to choose the tape type band-aid, which is different from our idea before.

Interview with Dr. Qu

Brief introduction to the professor:

Dr. Qu has studied molecular biology and the purification of protein expression over five years. The area that he focus on most was molecular clone, solid-phase synthesis of polypeptide, the purification of protein expression and synthetic biology. She has a postgraduate degree in chemistry in Chinese University of Hong Kong and posted several scientific literature before.

Details

Since we purified the protein with a natural method, SDS-PAGE still failed to record the correct strips that we expected. So, after a phase of the experiment, we meet a professor who can help our project directly. We visited Dr. Qu at the end of September. Firstly, we explained our original plan of experiment and some problems we met during the process recently. When the discussion became more in-depth, she pointed out the reason why we cannot get the satisfied result is that the quantity of the expression of protein was too large, which may form the inclusive body. Besides, she presented that the method of breaking the inclusive body is to use the degenerated way to purify the protein. After the meeting, we have changed our experiment strategy, and finally, we got the correct results from SDS-PAGE.

[1]: "Overview of Wound Healing in a Moist Environment”

http://www.wound-treatment.jp/english/index_e.htm