Team:SJTU-BioX-Shanghai

Background of Our Team

Our team consists of 11 members, who are all junior students of Shanghai Jiao Tong University. Most of us came from School of Life Science and Biotechnology. We are working, living and studying like a whole family.

Description of Our Project

Membrane Workshop

- Cluster makes it faster; interaction alters the direction

Motivation:

1. There lacks compartment in prokaryotic cells, and thus engineered enzymes diffuse in the cytoplasm, which makes certain reactions proceed at a very low speed.

2. Divergent biochemical pathways commonly exist in all types of organisms, but it is extremely hard to artificially control and switch the directions of these reactions.

What to do:

We aim to attach enzymes involved in certain reactions to membrane proteins in order to fulfill goals stated below:

1. To accelerate reactions in certain biochemical pathway

2. To switch the biochemical pathway from one to the other through extracellular signal control

Our ultimate goal is to design a universal tool which functions as “engine” and “switch”. We master the membrane of E.coli and change it into an efficient workshop, where biochemical reactions are highly driven and well controlled. The “membrane workshop” project will solve common problems existing in bioengineering, i.e. the speed limit rooted in compartment-lacking prokaryotic cells and the lack of control over branched reactions.