The IGEM team of our college won the international gold medal for the sixth time

Core Tip:Recently, the 2019 International Genetic Engineering Machine Design Contest (IGEM) ended in Boston's Haynes Convention Center. The IGEM team (HZAU-China) from Huazhong Agricultural University creatively put forward the idea of "recording" and "reproducing" the smell and won the gold medal in the competition with nearly 400 registered teams worldwide. This is also the sixth time for Huazhong Agricultural University to win the gold medal since 2013.

South Lake News Network News (Correspondent Wu Zhongsheng Rao Hao and Huang Zhuoqi) The 2019 International Genetic Engineering Machine Design Competition (IGEM) ended at 4: 00 pm on November 4 of US Eastern Time in Boston's Hayes Convention Center. The IGEM team (HZAU-China) from Huazhong Agricultural University won the gold medal in the competition with nearly 400 registered teams around the world. This is also the sixth time for Huazhong Agricultural University to win the gold medal since in 2013.

HZAU-China team's inspiration for this competition came from a child. In an experiment class of "future scientist class", a child turned over the photos and videos on his father's cell phone and sighed with emotion: "the tested reagent tastes so special, I hope the taste can be preserved like photos or videos." IGEM member Hu Jiani works as a teaching assistant nearby and took this sentence into her heart.

With the development of science and technology, it is no longer difficult to record and reproduce sounds, pictures. However, people can only remember the smell in their mind or describe it in words.

How to record and reproduce smell? IGEM team members decided to try it out.

Through exploration and practice, the team has built a "bacterial recorder" that integrates quorum sensing, Riboregulator and metabolism and logic gate control systems, and has realized the memory and reproduction of benzyl alcohol bitter almond flavor for the first time.

The project senses benzyl alcohol through ArAreRare transcription factor, activate LuxI expression. LuxI protein catalyzes the generation of AHL quorum sensing molecules and activates downstream quorum sensing positive feedback loop to generate taRNA, thus achieving the "recording" effect. At the same time of positive feedback of quorum sensing, Riboregulator and a member of gate taRNA gradually accumulates in bacteria to achieve "storage" effect. Then, the reproduction signal molecule activates the generation of another member of gate crRNA and Riboregulator and its regulated subsequent RNA. After taRNA is combined with crRNA, the expression of benzyl alcohol related enzymes is turned on to catalyze the generation of benzyl alcohol, which achievs the effect of "reproduction" of smell.

This year's IGEM team consists of more than 20 undergraduates from the institutes of life science and technology, information, engineering, animal science, animal medicine, humanities and law, economics and management, aquatic products and plant science and technology. Most of them are laboratory freshmen and sophomores.

Since the beginning of June this year, the team members have started to prepare various experimental materials. With the joint efforts of everyone, the project was completed by more than half in August. However, due to the complexity of metabolic engineering, the team members tried almost all possible schemes. After exploring and testing day and night, the team finally successfully completed all the experiments of the project in mid-October. During this period, they also completed a variety of Human Practices activities, complicated mathematical modeling and tedious web page applications, submitted the data and samples for the competition.

After arriving in Boston, the team members were still preparing and rehearsing in order to do the best of the project presentation. In the end, the team was praised by the referee and other teams for its professional and fluent English and concise and comprehensive exposition.

During the exploration of the project, the team's guide teachers Ma Bingguang, He Jin and Wang Mao devoted a lot of efforts. Yuan Jihong, Qi Yingchun, Li Liu, Chen Wenli, Cao Gang and Sun Ming also gave the team pertinent suggestions. The team also received strong support from the undergraduate college of the school, the international cooperation and exchange department.

Captain Rao Xichen said, "As Romain Rolland said,' I have loved and admired the past, but I hope the future goes beyond the past. What it wants to surpass, it will surpass, HZAU-China's IGEMer never stops at the past and stops at the gold medal. We look forward to the future. What we want to surpass, we will surpass! "

IGEM contest was launched by Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2003. It is a frontier cross science and top-level science and technology contest in the frontier cross science-synthetic biology and has become a platform for global youth academic exchange and scientific and technological innovation

Nearly 400 teams from more than 70 countries and regions participated in the competition with a total number of more than 5,000. 138 teams from China went to United States for contest.

Audit: He Jin