Team:UESTC-China

Introduction

With the rapid society development, a large amount of pollutants are full of our daily life. Nowadays, chemical materials are widely used in our surroundings indoor, such as building materials, paint in new apartments, artificial adhesives in numerous household products and etc., which may lead to excess release of formaldehyde in closed space. Exposing to the substantial formaldehyde may cause irritation, allergic asthma and neurasthenia, as well as carcinogenesis. Nowadays, people mainly get rid of the formaldehyde by increase the rate of ventilating or using air purifier in those polluted spaces. However, these methods showed some limitation, and cannot degrade formaldehyde safely and effectively.

We did a survey of formaldehyde pollution and the results showed that people paid high attention to the indoor formaldehyde pollution, and they hoped to decrease the concentration of formaldehyde effectively using a safe and environmentally method. Based on this survey result, we wanted to use synthetic biology to design a super plant guarder which can remove formaldehyde effectively.

There is a HCHO-fixation pathway in methylotrophs which is called ribulose monophosphate (RuMP) pathway. HPS and PHI are two key enzymes in this pathway. Besides, there is a formaldehyde folate-independent pathway in plants, FALDH and FDH, which play an important role in this pathway. In 2014 iGEM project, we hoped to effectively integrate formaldehyde metabolism related genes from methylotrophs and plants to reconstruct a new formaldehyde metabolism pathway in tobacco, which can get rid of the formaldehyde in confined space.

In addition, we co-expressed gene AHA2 with formaldehyde metabolism genes. AHA2 is used to regulate stomata opening which is from Arabidopsis thaliana. And it could effectively enlarge the stomata opening when it was specifically expressed in tobacco leaves. We hoped to increase the efficiency of formaldehyde physical absorbing, ensure the substrate supply for the reconstructed formaldehyde metabolism pathway, and further increased the efficiency of formaldehyde degradation of super plants.

Considering the biosafety of genetically modified organism, we brought in cysteine protease expression part. The transgenic tobacco pollen aborted while cysteine protease gene specifically expressed in tobacco tapetum. Consequently, we ensured the biosafety of super plants.

With more and more achievements have been harvested about the super plant, we organized various activities such as questionnaire survey, mini-lecture, videos making, etc, to vigorously promote synthetic biology, iGEM and our super plant.

Along with the happy summer vacation, we had completed our project successfully with the efforts of all members. Let's meet at MIT and share each other's harvest.