Team:Tongji China/tags/v0.2/json/hp.json
{
"header": "Contents
HUMAN PRACTICES
", "content": "Choosing of the expression system
Initially, we wanted to choose a cell-free system as our expression system, which is more controllable and easier to analyze than traditional expression systems. However, we had a discussion with Professor Li Ping. She told us that the cost of a cell-free system is too high, and fermentation is more mature. Besides, if we want to find another raw material instead of tryptophan for indigo, it is hard to perform in a cell-free system because it may need too many enzymes to do the work. The cell-free system may not have the advantage as we expected. Considering the cost and variability, we decided to use microorganisms as our chassis.
About the selection of the final product
In our vision, if indican can be our final product, it can significantly reduce the sewage costs of dyeing & finishing enterprises. Therefore, we want to use indican as our target product. However, Manager Song of Hongstex Dyeing & Finishing Co. Ltd told us that indigo, as a dye with a long history of industrial application, has a complete process of dyeing. If we want to change it to indican, it will take a lot of time to develop new dyeing processes, which will greatly extend the cycle from our development to final application. So we reconsidered our project and realized that indigo and indican do not have many differences in the production process, and the use of indican was still lagging behind indigo (there were currently no instances of large-scale production and dyeing of indican). Therefore, we believe that our project should be divided into two steps. First of all, we would focus on the production of indigo, as the first step in the promotion of bio-indigo dyes to application. In the long-term development, indican still has a better development prospect, so we still need to try to establish a viable solution for indican dyeing as the long-term goal of our project.
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\" class=\"img img-fluid rounded shadow-lg\">Adjust our project goals
Every team wants their project to finally become a reality, and we are no exception. Chemically synthesized indigo takes aniline as raw material, some hazardous chemicals，e.g. formaldehyde, sodium hydroxide, sodium dithionite, will be introduced in the production of chem-indigo, posing a threat to workers’ safety.The application of chem-indigo will also create a large number of environmental pollutants. We believe that our project will help address an environmental and resource issue that deserves attention, so we focused on how to ultimately apply our project to reality. We believe that first of all we need to consider our competitors, so we contacted Jiangsu Taifeng Chemical Co. Ltd, the world's largest indigo supplier, to learn about the world indigo market and the chemical synthesis of indigo. They shared their information about the world indigo market, which said there is no bio-indigo in the market until now.Due to the restrictions of domestic environmental protection policies, the leading company of the indigo industry, urgently needs to seek new methods of indigo production. Therefore, after we presented our project, they showed a great interest in it, and suggested that we could have further cooperation. Besides they put forward some request about high productivity and feasible production process.
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\" class=\"col-6 img img-fluid rounded shadow-lg\">With SJTU Dr.Xiao
Mr. Xiao put forward many suggestions on our project objectives and experimental design, analyzed the possible reasons for the failure of our experiments, and shared some experience of DNA fusion. Two plasmids were warmly presented to us, which is of great help to the concrete implementation of our project!
We visited SJTU and interviewed Dr. Xiao Yi from the department of bioengineering. After introducing our project, we discussed about how to achieve our pathway.
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