Achievement

Judging form

As for the Bronze and sliver Medal:

√ Register the team, have a great summer, and plan to have fun at the Regional Jamboree.

√ Successfully complete and submit this iGEM 2013 Judging form.

√ Create and share a Description of the team's project using the iGEM wiki and the team's parts using the Registry of Standard Biological Parts.

√ Plan to present a Poster and Talk at the iGEM Jamboree.

√ Document more than one new standard BioBrick Parts or Devices central to our project and submit these parts to the iGEM Registry.

√ Experimentally validate that new BioBrick Parts or Devices of our design and construction works as expected.

√ Document the characterization of new parts in the 'Main Page' of that Part's/Device's Registry entry and submit them to the iGEM Parts Registry.

√ We carried out several human practice activities including a campus popularization, TEDx talk, popularizing iPSCs with medical workers and patients in the Provincial Hospital of Traditional Chinese Medicine in Guangdong. What’s more, we had a lot of interactions with Guangdong international life science foundation (GDILSF), who then provided us an opportunity to visit Guangzhou institutes of biomedicine and health (GIBH). Besides, we have wrote several popular science articles about iPSCs and regenerate medicine field, which are ready to publish on our local newspaper.

As for the Gold Medal:

√ We have improved the function of an existing BioBrick Part (BBa_K1061006) by test it in a new type of chassis cell, and we have created a new registry page for the improved part, and submitted this part to the iGEM Registry.

√ We have helped South China University of Technology (SCUT) team to debug one of their promoter constructs. We also gave technical suggestion about the synthesis of T7 promoter, and provided them a plasmid that contains ADH terminator to help them construct their circuit. We provided them a gene called hBax (BBa_K1061006), which we have tested to be a workable part, as the positive control in their experiment. Besides, we also helped team South University of Science and Technology of China ( SUSTC ) by testing their software, and gave them useful suggestions.

√ Our project has implications for the iPSCs application in regenerate medicine field. Actually our design itself is a novel approach we used to minimize the potential tumorigenicity risks of iPSCs and accelerate the development of moving iPSC-based therapies to the patient bedside. Synthetic biological technique helps us to set up an accurate and controllable model of our design. What’s more, with the mature tet-off system we used, in the future it’s even possible that patients could get a healthier and safer liver derived from their own iPSCs without taking any medicine in the long term.

Experimental achievements (Up to Sep. 25)

√ Via transient transfection experiments, we successfully proved that each parts of our design (suicide gene, tet-off system and miR122 target) work as expected in both hepatma cell lines and 293T cell lines.

√ Via stable transfection with lentivirus, we successfully established several cell lines (Hep G2, HTC and mouse iPSC) stably expressing our device.

√ Successfully generated Oct4-GFP iPSCs, which harbor an IRES-EGFP fusion cassette downstream of the stop codon of the Oct4 (Pou5f1) gene.

√ Successfully proved that our suicide genes part worked in stable expression mouse iPSC lines.

√ Successfully isolated and cultured the primary hepatocytes from mice. Because hepatocyte is very hard to both transiently and stably tranfect (at only 10% efficiency), we are still trying to improve the transfection efficiency.

√ Trying to inject the mouse stable iPSCs containing our device into nude mice and wait for the in vivo result.