Team:CHINA CD UESTC/hp HKU
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EXPERT ADVICE
We are a skillful and persistent group of nine Finns. We started as a group of students who didn't really know each other, assuming that we were going to spend our summer studying synthetic biology with strange colleagues. In the end we got a bunch of new friends and (in addition to studying synthetic biology) we just might have spent one of the best summers of our lives.
Communicated with Hong Kong University
Purpose:
This year the UESTC iGEM team undertook our project with human practices in mind. While we have established a detailed safety system in our experiments, we wanted to ensure that our system was sufficiently complete and qualified. As well, we wanted to ensure that academic and government professionals’ concerns were taken into consideration during the design process of our system. In order to best accomplish this, we conducted interviews with the professor of the Hong Kong University Medicine School. His experience allowed us to better ensure our experiment safety system.
On May 8th 2015
Members of the Hong Kong University Medicine School visited UESTC Life Science and Technology School. We iGEM experiment team took the opportunity to talk about our project with Professor Zhaoyi Hu. Knowing the main processes of our project, Prof.Hu said, "It seems that the competition not only requires you players have a certain professional basis and innovation capability, but also is a test of students' learning and thinking comprehensive ability." Then he put forward his concerns especially in biosafety aspects, namely, whether the bacteria source itself is safe or pathogenic, and if gene modified organisms are safe.
In the aspect of biosafety, our project have achieved three aspects as following:
1. The safety of bacteria source: DH5α and BL21 (DE3) we use are common bacterial strains;
2. The safety of transgenosis: The genes we will transfer are nonpathogenic and nonpolluting. There are little adverse impacts on environment and rare probability of transgene escape.
3. The safety of experimental operation: We players have formed a strict operation habit, such as sterilization of transgenosis bacterias, protection of experimenters.
In the end, Prof.Hu told us the general processes of sample treatment in medical research as well as separation and preservation methods of some bacteria strains.
Professor Zhaoyi Hu is head of Microbiology Department of Hong Kong University Medicine School, Infection and Immunity Joint Research Center of Hong Kong University. Their results research have a broad impact on international academic circles, especially the medical community .