Achievement

Judging Criteria

1. We have registered our team.

2. We have completed the Judging form.

3. We have set up our wiki.

4. We have prepared our poster and presentation and we are ready to present them in the Asia Jamboree.

5. We have designed and constructed six novel standard BioBrick Parts which were used in our project. All our standard BioBrick Parts have been submitted to the iGEM Registry before the deadline. The quantitative data indicating the functions and characteristics of these parts are shown in our wiki to make them applicable to other teams.

6. We have tested our standard BioBrick Parts in our project with specific experiments, from which we have got qualitative and quantitative results. These BioBricks of our own design and construction work as expected according to the experimental validation. The data and results are accessible in our wiki.

7. We have documented the characterization of our standard BioBrick Parts in the “Main Page” section of the Part’s/Device’s Registry entry. We have submitted one regulatory part (BBa_K1024000), one reporter part (BBa_K1024001), and four signaling parts (BBa_K1024002, BBa_K1024003, BBa_K1024004, & BBa_K1024005).

8. We have submitted our novel standard BioBrick Parts to the iGEM Parts Registry and the submissions adhere to the iGEM Registry guidelines.

9. We have taken the implications for the environment, security, safety, ethics, and sharing into consideration in the design and execution of our project. The aim of our project is constructing a novel portable system to detect pathogens with the principles of synthetic biology, which indicates that our system is supposed to be safe to potential patients, easy for usage and sharing, friendly to the environment, and acceptable for ethical issues. We choose S. cerevisiae (Yeast) as the host for our system instead of E. coli or other bacteria because yeast is widely used in food and drink manufacturing, which means that yeast is fundamentally friendlier to human health than other microorganisms. The use of yeast would also be environment-friendly and acceptable for ethical issues for the reason that the technologies and knowledge about handling yeast have been widely accepted and developed. During the execution of our project, we strictly obeyed the principles and instructions of doing experiments and implemented our design to make sure that we keep everything in order and safe.

10. We have improved the functions of existing standard BioBrick Parts, entered the information about them in the Registry, created new registry pages for the improved parts and submitted these parts to the iGEM Parts Registry. We constructed and improved standard BioBrick Parts about quorum sensing systems and modified the systems in prokaryotic microorganisms for usage in S. cerevisiae (Yeast). We modified the transcription activator, LuxR (BBa_C0062), by adding nuclear localization sequence (NLS) and Herpes simplex virus VP16 activation domain in N-terminus of LuxR, and ligated the sequence of this modified LuxR to downstream of TEF promoter, which is the constitutive promoter in yeast (BBa_K1024000). We also modified the transcriptional regulated promoter in quorum sensing system, Plux promoter (BBa_R0062), by adding cyc100 mini promoter downstream of the Plux promoter (BBa_K1024001).

11. We have constructed and improved the standard BioBrick Parts about quorum sensing systems and modified the systems in prokaryotic microorganisms for usage in S. cerevisiae (Yeast). We modified the transcription activator, LuxR (BBa_C0062), by adding nuclear localization sequence (NLS) and Herpes simplex virus VP16 activation domain in N-terminus of LuxR, and ligated the sequence of this modified LuxR to downstream of TEF promoter, which is the constitutive promoter in yeast (BBa_K1024000). Also, we modified the transcriptional regulated promoter in quorum sensing system, Plux promoter (BBa_R0062), by adding cyc100 mini promoter downstream of the Plux promoter (BBa_K1024001). Using mCherry in the downstream of the pLux system, we verified that our system worked with certain efficiency. We accomplished the communication between eukaryotic cells and prokaryotic cells for the first time by introducing the genetically modified quorum sensing system from Gram-negative bacteria (LuxR-AHL controlled transcriptional activation system) to S. cerevisiae. The original LuxR-AHL system does not function in eukaryotic systems.

12. We have helped many registered iGEM teams in different aspects. First of all, we helped OUC-CHINA for the modeling part of their project this year. Our team and OUC-CHINA has established a long term collaboration relationship since 2012. A member of our team has been trained well in a lab focusing in bioinformatics and is adept in stimulating biological processes using mathematical methods. So this year we helped their modeling in resetting the parameters to stimulate their system better. Secondly, since our school has been participating in iGEM for several years, we helped several teams which planned to participate in iGEM for the first time this year by sharing our experiences on iGEM. We introduced the history of this worldwide competition, told them the procedures and rules of iGEM, and gave suggestions on how to solve certain problems that they might face, such as how to organize a team, how to get funding, and how to prepare for everything beyond mere wet experiments, especially modeling. We did this to several new iGEM teams including BIT, BIT-CHINA, and the students from Nanjing University (though we are not clear which team they finally formed).

13. We have created a novel portable pathogen detector which is useful in not only disease detection, but also environmental quality control, food safety detection and clinical diagnosis. The portable pathogen detector has a comprehensive application in many aspects of public health security.
    
    To expand the influence of synthetic biology and Tsinghua iGEM 2013 team, we made three episodes of movie series, introducing basic biology knowledge and our team project.
    
    • Come on! Chromosomes! (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7nM9d4rtLJ4)
    • The Great Neuron (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_zI_qL3legY)
    • iGEM TSINGHUA 2013 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nx_qiZoh0u0)
    The movies were widely viewed and welcomed, helping people gain a better understanding about the issue we addressed.
    
    One of our team members also wrote a fiction telling an imagined story happening in the process of completing our team project. Since publishing on a social website, it has received 76925 hits. (http://blog.renren.com/blog/244418821/895276049) The log increased the popularity of iGEM and our team as well.
    
    The movies and the log called a lot of attention to iGEM and our team. The publicizing of our team project provided the public with the new concept of portable pathogen detector we designed.
    
    In addition, we held several lectures to introduce iGEM and synthetic biology, exhibiting our project on the scientific exhibition during the college anniversary.
    
    We conducted a survey about the potential application of our project.
    
    We also have collaborations with several iGEM teams including OUC_CHINA, Nanjing Univ, BIT, BIT-CHINA and the other teams from Tsinghua University.