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Team:XMU-China
From 2013.igem.org
Our team
12 members pulling together make all the difference. Every day is full of smile and confidence. Every day is a new day!
Our project
This year we built a gene circuit with synchronizing genetic oscillations in multiple levels (liquid & gas phase).
Just think, what an amazing thing it would be when all the E.coli twinkle in the same phase.
Our software & modeling
The mathematic model of oscillation gave us a deeper understanding about our circuit.
The image analysis software reduced most of work in post processing about the microfluidic photos.
Human practice
Playing with 300 senior high students in the garden party left us wonderful memories.
Guessing the lantern riddles is really interesting, right?
Society & Safety
Safety is the most important thing in the wet lab. Our team has done a series of work to meet the requirement.
Overview
Project
Oscillations permeate every corner of the world, from the alternative current （AC） in power lines to our tiny microorganism friends. To use oscillations in bacteria as a strong and steady signal transmission method like AC, we need to tackle with the noise of transcription and translation in the cellular environment by coupling millions of cells through the synchronizing genetic oscillations in E.coli. At the colony level cells could be synchronized via quorum sensing, which is limited to tens of micrometers by the AHL, and between colonies a gas-phase redox (mainly H2O2) will serve as a signal that can give positive feedback to the whole circuit over millimeter scales simultaneously. On a liquid crystal display (LCD), like microfluidic array, bacteria grow in separate colonies so that synchronization in both levels could be verified visually. Now a robust synthetic biology signal converter is accomplished and ready to show the growth environment of cells.
Software
We coded two softwares with Matlab related to our experiment.
First one is Gene OS, the model of oscillation which simulates our circuit and compares various results with different initial conditions. This gave us a deeper understanding of the mechanism.
The other one is ImageMe which offers batch processing function and saves much of time in analyzing the microfluidic images.
Human Practice
Our team has held a series of events as human practice. During the whole July, we has drawn a doodle about iGEM, held a garden party and exhibition, made a questionnaire survey and hosted a synthetic biology lecture.
Our aim is to let participants have a better understanding of iGEM, synthetic biology as well as the wet lab safety.
Every event has its unique charm of being favored and welcomed!
Society & Safety
Nowadays, more and more people tend to build an environmentally friendly society and take issues of safety of wet lab more seriously.
Our team used non-pathogenic E. coli strains to construct our circuit and gathered all culture fluid and culture medium with cells for unified treatment.
A series of other measurements were taken to meet the safety requirements.
