Tao Fei
Researcher, School of Life Sciences, Shanghai Jiao Tong University
In today's era of encouraging innovation, many people will feel that it is imperative to take the road of interdisciplinarity. Can the Shanghai Science and Technology Rising Star group, characterized by a large number of members, complete disciplines and vigorous innovation vitality, provide some interdisciplinary success stories? As soon as this topic is mentioned, the author immediately thinks of Zai Jiantao and Tao Fei, two star friends.
They are also 2018 star friends, working in the School of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering and the School of Life Sciences of Shanghai Jiao Tong University. At the 2018 Municipal Science and Technology Commission organized by the Municipal Science and Technology Commission to award the certificate exchange meeting of the selected star friends that year, the two people knew each other. It was at that exchange meeting that they talked about their respective research directions and the help they hoped to get. At that time, Tao Fei was struggling to find a nanomaterial, which was a common thing in Zai Jiantao's laboratory. The two talked about their respective research interests, and they had a great sense of seeing each other and hating each other. After the meeting, the two people moved around frequently and exchanged warmly, and in just three years, three cooperation achievements have been formed, and the fourth is also planning to advance.
In the previous Daystar newsletter, the author reported that Zai Jiantao and Tao Fei had begun to explore interdisciplinary information. In 2020, when preparing for the fourth "double carbon" theme of the Daystar Forum, Zai and Tao jointly sent a theme report on "Electric Drive Microbial Carbon Sequestration", which is the second cross-cooperation content promoted by them. This remark immediately aroused the author's impulse to do this joint interview with the two of them. The interview lasted six hours from noon to six o'clock in the evening, and the interview notes were 17 pages long. This is a record-breaking in the history of Daystar interviews. What are the experiences of the two star friends? What factors allow them to walk more smoothly on the road of cross-complementarity? What are the unique insights into basic research and how to go through the road of interdisciplinarity?
Start with the growth story of Tao Fei Xingyou.
Likes to observe and do well, 7 years old can "repair" tractors
Tao Fei was born in 1983 in Suzhou, Anhui. Both parents worked as farmers, and my father also learned a carpenter's craft. "Ploughing the plough of the plough is recognized as a difficult craft in carpentry work, only my father can do it, and the plough he makes is used to cultivate land and save effort, and even people from several surrounding counties have come to visit." Although this unique job slowly lost with the arrival of the tractor era, Tao Fei was deeply impressed when it came to his father's carpentry work: "Since I was a child, I have been my father's helper, helping him to pull saws, pulling drills when drilling holes, and hearing about it. I can do a little carpentry work myself, such as when I was in the third or fourth grade, I made a piggy bank out of wood that could be opened. At that time, I also secretly learned to do it secretly, and my father did not support me and asked me to study more. But my father was very pleased to see that the little piggy bank I made was quite decent. These childhood acquired abilities are very much related to the later self-made experimental devices. ”
Speaking of childhood life and the cultivation of ability, Tao Fei said that he especially liked to observe when he was a child. "When I was a child, I never saw a tractor or a car, and as soon as I heard that the tractor entered the village, I would chase the tractor and run, and as soon as the tractor stopped, I would look around, see its wheels, motors, and climb up and sit down when I had the opportunity." When Tao Fei was about 7 years old, his family bought a tractor, which made him happy, watched it over and over again, and almost wrote down its structure. Once the tractor at home malfunctioned, asked the master to repair, but after repairing for half a day, it still could not be opened, and the master could not find the reason. After the master left, Tao Fei ran over to his father and said that it might be that the clutch was reversed, and the last time he saw it was not like this. Tao Dad's dead horse was a live horse doctor, and the father and son took it down and tried it, and sure enough, they pretended to be reversed. "This is also my ability to observe, without which many things in scientific research will not be done well."
Near-death experience promotes epiphany, and partial teenagers become academic bullies
But this valuable observation ability, hands-on ability did not bring benefits to Tao Fei, who had just gone to school, on the contrary, because he spent too much time playing and did not like to do homework, his grades after going to school have been bad, the worst time was the third to last place in the class, always criticized by the teacher, and his family thought that he was not the material for reading. However, Tao Fei, who is not willing to learn according to the rules, likes to fiddle with various machines, likes to play with bicycles, and flatbeds that pull coal will become the objects he likes to play. The physics textbooks of the two sisters were amusing after reading them, and the textbooks about how the motor worked immediately attracted him, and he wanted to do the motor by hand - according to the explanation of the book, the copper wire on the electrical appliance was removed and wound around the coil to make the motor. At that time, his family was opposed to his enthusiasm for doing things, in the eyes of many people, Tao Fei was a scum who did not study well, and even all the teachers and classmates at that time thought that this child would be difficult to make any progress in learning in the future. This state of affairs was maintained until the first day of the first year.
In the second year of junior high school, the school opened a physics class that Tao Fei liked. Tao Fei had read the contents of these physics textbooks, and as soon as he took the exam, he felt that these questions would be done, and his physics score was actually one or two in the class. The class teacher seems to have discovered talent. But the class teacher told him that it was just physics that was good, and it was not okay for other subjects to be so bad. An incident that happened later deeply touched Tao Fei, and he made up his mind and decided to learn other lessons well.
In the summer vacation of the second year of junior high school, once Tao Fei played with water in the pond in the village, there were many deep pits left by taking soil at the bottom of the pond, Tao Fei's feet slipped into the pit, there was nothing around to climb, the feet were not on the ground, he felt that his body was sinking, desperately trying to call for help but a nervous voice could not be heard, but the hand was still desperately moving, and the water did not pass his head for a few seconds. It was a moment of impending death, and the feeling of helplessness and despair was still fresh in his mind.
Fortunately, an adult not far away found him and rescued him. "In these few seconds, it seems to me to cross the two worlds of yin and yang." This experience of "resurrection from the dead" made Tao Fei suddenly have an epiphany - death is not far from a person. He remembered the words of his grandfather and teacher, either to be a carpenter or to make up his mind to study well. From that day on, a tragic emotion suddenly arose in his heart--man lives in the world, his time is very limited, and he has to do something meaningful. "Because I have stayed on the brink of death, I have developed a kind of strength that is not afraid of death and dares to fight, and I am willing to make efforts regardless of the cost and regardless of the return."
Since then, Tao Fei has been like a different person, he used the self-study method to re-learn the First and Second Grade Chinese textbooks, and the First to Second Grade English textbooks were also re-memorized, and these two courses were the worst he had at that time. "During that time, I used to learn to two o'clock in the morning, and then get up at seven o'clock in the morning to go to school. In addition to hard work, there are also some improvements in the method, such as writing a diary every day and holding an endorsement contest with the same table. It took a whole year, Tao Fei made up for the previous two years of class evil, the original year can not use a refill, the last year used dozens of, the results are very obvious, the junior high school graduation exam took the first place in the township, went to the county's provincial demonstration middle school. This state of intransigence continued until high school, which also maintained the top few in the class.
During the college entrance examination, Tao Fei's physical condition was not good, and he had a high fever to 42 degrees on the night of the examination. Although the final score exceeded the key line, but there is still a distance from Tao Fei's ideal University of Science and Technology of China, considering family economy and other reasons, he finally chose Shandong University and was admitted to the School of Life Sciences majoring in pharmaceutical engineering.
The teacher's school bus said something that changed Tao Fei's life path
Tao Fei studied at Shandong University for 9 years, graduating from undergraduate to doctoral degree. His undergraduate major was pharmacy, and in his junior year, he entered Xu Ping's laboratory. Once, on the school bus, a female teacher chatted with Tao Fei and reminded him that he should now consider what he would do in the future, and could not just bury his head in reading. Tao Fei is still very grateful to this teacher's point, which is why he entered the laboratory in his junior year. Tao Fei, who had just entered the laboratory, saw all magical things in his eyes and his eyes were wide open. Teacher Xu Ping asked him to follow the experiment of biological desulfurization of fuel oil, which also became his doctoral research topic.
When he graduated from his senior year, Tao Fei achieved innovative stage results, and when he published articles in mainstream magazines in the field, he won a scholarship. Tao Fei said that Xu Ping was very open-minded and gave him a lot of freedom, and he tried to do a lot of challenging topics related to genome manipulation. Although most of these explorations were fruitless, they accumulated a lot of methods and learned about the frontiers of the discipline.
Tao Fei was lucky, and the years of his PhD were the eve of a breakthrough in synthetic biology. Tao Fei's imaginative and exploratory work also laid the foundation for him to enter this field in the future. In 2007, As a well-known scientist in the field of microbiology, Professor Xu Ping was introduced by Shanghai Jiaotong University, and it was necessary to establish a new disciplinary direction at Jiaotong University, tao Fei, as the main member of Xu Ping's team, joined Shanghai Jiaotong University after graduating with his doctorate, that is, in 2010.
Tao Fei collaborated with Zai Jiantao to do experiments
Intelligent metabolic reprogramming, key moments to get "star" help
After coming to Jiaotong University, Teacher Xu established the direction of industrial microbiology and synthetic biology with Tao Fei as his assistant. Tao Fei won the Youth Project of the National Natural Science Foundation of China in 2011, which was also the first batch of synthetic biology directions supported by the Foundation Committee. Tao Fei's direction at that time was to transform microorganisms for the production of various compounds, which is now called "cell factory".
Among them, the content of transforming photosynthetic cyanobacteria to produce various useful compounds from light energy and carbon dioxide is the direction of the "light-driven cell factory" that is now more popular. The biggest obstacle to designing a cell to synthesize compounds is that the metabolic network of the cell is too complex, and its complexity is no less than that of the human neural network, but the existing understanding is very limited, and it is almost impossible to rationally intervene in the cellular metabolic network, and the workload is very large. Before there is no breakthrough in methods, you can only continue to slowly explore through trial and error.
After doing it for a few years, by 2014, Tao Fei's team proposed whether it was possible to change the way of thinking, find out the key "sensitive points" of the metabolic network, and manipulate the metabolic network through the intervention of sensitive points and intelligent design. This led to the concept of intelligent metabolic reprogramming, which the team tried and did some of the more successful work. At the end of 2017, in order to continue to promote the direction of intelligent metabolic reprogramming, Tao Fei applied for the Daystar project and received funding in 2018 to support him to continue to explore in this direction. "This 400,000 Daystar project is particularly valuable for us young teachers in colleges and universities, it can make me settle down and force me to do good ideas step by step."
It is precisely with the traction of the Daystar program that I can continue to do the work of the system in this direction. Later, based on the research in this direction, in 2019 I applied for the Young Scientist Project of the National Key Research and Development Program, and in 2020, I applied for the Young Yangtze River Scholars Award Program. Tao Fei told that the work of resolving cellular metabolic networks is still advancing and has begun to merge with artificial intelligence. Metabolic networks can be seen as a super complex black box, and solving the black box problem is exactly what artificial intelligence is good at. With the blessing of artificial intelligence, it may be possible to predict and judge the properties of metabolic networks under given conditions without a detailed understanding of the internal mechanisms of metabolic networks, such as product concentration, production efficiency, etc. Although it is still in the process, Tao Fei believes that it is not far from cracking the mystery of the cellular metabolic network.
MIT was inspired by the training and cross-disciplinary foundation
In the process of working at Jiaotong University, Tao Fei went to the MIT Media Laboratory Bit Atom Center for a year as a visiting scholar in 2013, participating in protein engineering and membrane protein work to improve protein stability. MIT's Media Lab is a world-renowned pioneer in interdisciplinary research, where disciplines such as computers, Internet, robotics, biology, and art can all be integrated in a large span. The open design of the laboratory and the layout of the solitary living area are very convenient for researchers to communicate and discuss. It was also there that Tao Fei's idea of interdisciplinarity was stimulated by further training.
Tao Fei at MIT
After returning to Jiaotong University in 2014, he wanted to do some interdisciplinary exploration but could not find opportunities for cooperation. In 2018, foreign scholars mentioned the concept of semiconductor synthetic biology, Tao Fei immediately realized that doing biological sensing - especially odor sensing - is the opportunity to cut into semiconductor synthetic biology, just at that time at the Daystar certification exchange meeting met Zai Jiantao Xingyou, who did nanotechnology research, which opened the research process of synthetic biology and nanotechnology.
-This article is excerpted from the "Today's Rising Star" column of World Science Magazine No. 1, 2022-
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