Team:Nanjing China Bio/notebook

5.12(all)
This is our first regular meeting since we formed our iGEM team. During this meeting, we introduced ourselves to each other, and learned more about our goal. Our team consists of sophomore and junior students from different departments.

The first section was given by Jingwei about the general background of iGEM and the specific requirements of the competition. The techniques that could be used in our experiments were also introduced, and it's lucky to know that we have already learned the fundamental knowledge of these techniques. After our team leader gave a briefing about the early studies of the research, we had an analysis about the Salmonella we will use in our experiments that have been knocked out of two genes.
Given that we are the first team of our university to take part in the competition, it's essential that we should learn from other teams and use their experience for reference. Therefore in our second section, we used the teams of Imperial College of London, Shanghai Jiaotong University, University of Washington, and Slovenia University as examples. All these teams gave us some great ideas. Firstly, we could innovate from the common phenomenon in daily life, like the team of Imperial College which had their research based on the water absorbency of root hair. In addition, our ideas could be realized using up-to-date techniques and methods, like the team of Slovenia University which applied many advanced techniques like SRP, EMSA, and FRET to accomplish their goal. Last but not least, creating a website that is unique and can reflect the process of our thinking and exploring is significant.
In the last section, tasks of literature related reading were assigned to every member. Although it might be a tough way to go, we are all looking forward to our work ahead.

5.19(all)
This is our second regular meeting, one week after the first one. In the last week, we read some documents concerning the latest researches on cancer therapies using Salmonella, which helped us know better about the characteristics of the bacteria we want to research on.
In the meeting, Jiren continued on the presentation on the team of Slovenia 2008, whose topic based on the biosynthesis of Helicobacter Pylori (HP). Their team had novel ideas on their BioBricks, resulting in their well reputation. Following was related introduction on the new idea of BioBricks by Jingwei. In a word, BioBrick standard biological parts are DNA sequences consisting of a cleavage site and a specific function sequence. (BioBrick standard biological parts are DNA sequences of defined structure and function; they share a common interface and are designed to be composed and incorporated into living cells to construct new biological systems.) As all our members are the first time to get in touch with this conception, it caused heated discussion about the main structure and the process of constructing and composition of BioBricks.
Later, An gave a detailed introduction on primer design, combining his own experience in the laboratory. In addition, he pointed out some problems when using those two Endonucleases, which would be of great help in the experiments following.
Based on this background knowledge, we portrayed the blueprint of our research ideas. Our goal was to improve the Salmonella we have. In other words, besides keeping its advantage of having anticancer effect, we want to diminish the damage it would cause to normal cells and increase its specifity significantly. In addition, we aim to make Salmonella a universal element that could be inserted into other bacterial cells.
Guided by the idea above, we decided to divide our work based on several parts: the invasion mechanism of Salmonella, immune mechanism, and chemical reaction mechanism. We hope that after comprehending the basic knowledge, we could come up with our own unique ideas.

5.29(all) Today, we had a deep discussion with our lead teacher, Pro. Zichun Hua. He advised us to adjust the way of reading documents. We decided to divide our team into 5 groups focusing separately on the following aspects based on the review Engineering the Perfect (bacterial) Cancer Therapy: specific bacterial targeting of tumors, intratumoral penetration, native bacterial cytotoxicity, expression of anti-cancer agents, and gene-triggering strategies detection of bacterial therapies. Each group has two students to work together on researching on the related documents on that specific project, and show the others their conclusion and comprehension.