diff --git a/wiki/pages/human-practices.html b/wiki/pages/human-practices.html index 0c47db9d15923ab35cdd217f3f3d4040ded78070..fee4433e7e0184b1ac252c3d883bfa31b232353a 100644 --- a/wiki/pages/human-practices.html +++ b/wiki/pages/human-practices.html @@ -195,6 +195,35 @@ </div> </div> </div> +</div> + +<div class="row mt-4"> + <div class="col-lg-12"> + <div class="expert-card" onclick="toggleContent(this)"> + <div class="row"> + <div class="col-md-3"> + <img src="https://static.igem.wiki/teams/5187/wiki-hp-fig/liu-zhihua.jpg" alt="yhf" class="expert-image"> + </div> + <div class="col-md-9 expert-details"> + <span class="expert-name">Liu Zhihua</span> + <span class="expert-role">Expert</span> + <p class="expert-takeaway"> + <strong>Takeaway</strong><br> + Dr Liu Zhihua is an expert in intestinal homeostasis regulation, focusing on the interaction between host and microbiota. The team consulted Dr Liu Zhihua for the choice of yeast chassis. Dr Liu’s insights led to the attention on Saccharomyces cerevisiae, a safe and hugely studied yeast strain, and the relevant research “Self-tunable engineered yeast probiotics for the treatment of inflammatory bowel diseaseâ€, which was quite inspiring for our project. We finally chose Saccharomyces cerevisiae to engineer, and deployed the innate mating pathway for our design. + </p> + <div class="expert-content"> + <p><strong>Who</strong><br> + Liu Zhihua, Associate Professor of Tsinghua University School of Medicine, Editorial Board Member of 《Frontiers Cellular and Infection Microbiology》. She mainly explores the mechanism of intestinal microbiota-host interaction and develops strategies to promote intestinal homeostasis. + <p><strong>Why</strong><br> + When we encountered difficulties in determining the chassis, we communicated with Dr Liu Zhihua, an intestinal immunologist. She generously provided pragmatic suggestions and gave us great inspiration on pathway design.</p> + <p>Since the muscone receptor is a G-protein coupled receptor, and prokaryotes do not have G protein pathway, we could not use the EcN in the previous article and had to seek alternatives. While our understanding of the intestinal bacterial flora was extensive, our knowledge of fungi was limited. Therefore, we sought Dr. Liu Zhihua's expertise via email, inquiring about the yeasts that are resident in the intestinal tract, represent a relatively large portion of the microbial community, confer health benefits to humans, and are deemed safe for clinical applications. In consideration of experimental period and complexity, we also wished the yeast to be fast growing and well-studied, with readily available nutritional deficiency type. To conclude, the ideal chassis was required to be a eukaryotic normal flora in human intestine, with fast growing speed and mature culture method. </p> + <p>According to the thorough reply of Dr Liu Zhihua, Saccharomyces cerevisiae is one of the more abundant yeasts in the intestinal tract and is safer and less of a threat to human health than other more abundant fungi such as Candida. Moreover, as a model eukaryotic organism with a short growth cycle, Saccharomyces cerevisiae has a well-established culture and genetic transformation system, and a large variety of nutrient-deficient mutants that can be suitable for transformation screening with different vectors. She also recommended an article “Self-tunable engineered yeast probiotics for the treatment of inflammatory bowel diseaseâ€, which reported on an engineered Saccharomyces cerevisiae probiotic that has the potential to help treat inflammatory bowel disease. She proposed that the strain modifications in the article could be used as a reference for our experimental design. The strain utilized the innate mating pathway of yeast and functionally linked the human GPCR P2Y2 with modified chimeric yeast Gpa1–human Gαi3 protein. In this way, the engineered yeast could secret CD39-like eATP-degrading enzyme apyrase and suppress experimental intestinal inflammation in mice. This study had been a great source of inspiration. We were struggling with how to design our own signaling pathway, which was complicated with cAMP, but after that we realized a well-defined and less-interrupted intrinsic pathway in yeast. We reviewed additional literature and summarized the methods to produce chimeric mating pathway.</p> + <p>The advice given by Dr Liu Zhihua was pivotal. We determined the strain and signaling pathway design, and the feasibility of the project was significantly validated. </p> + </div> + </div> + </div> + </div> +</div> </div> <div class="row mt-4">