Collaborations

Throughout the 2022iGEM season, Bioplus-China often collaborated with other iGEM teams during the preparation process for the competition. We lever each other's strengths to complement our weaknesses respectively to fully achieve our goal in a most effective manner.

1. Meet up

Co-Host:Bioplus-China, ZJUT-China

ParticipantShanghaiTech-China, ZJU-China,XJTLU-CHINA,ZJUT-China,ZJUintl-China,Worldshaper-Shanghai
As the COVID-19 pandemic is still rampant around the world, restricting many daily activities, we had to make adjustments of our original plans, and one of the biggest changes we made was converting the offline meeting to an online one. However, our team held a meet up with ZJUT-China team, invited other teams to share their own projects online and asked for advice from different teams. Our team leader Chen Jiaqi registered for the meet up and figured out the sharing project sequence process (as shown in Figure 1). The Meet up was held both online and offline at 1pm on July 22, 2022. We used Tencent Conference to conduct activities with the online team. Each team will spend 15-20 minutes to introduce team composition, division of labor, background research, project principle, significance, progress and difficulties encountered and solved in the project. At the end of each team's session, there will be a five-minute question-and-answer section when other participating teams can ask questions. Since the topics selected by each team are quite different, this activity also helps us to better understand other teams.

2. Collaboration with WHU-China

1) Experimental technical support

Our project need to purify the spider silk protein, but there is no purification experiment that has been done before.So we need the guidance of experienced personnel who can provide us some advice about protein purification. With their help we know that some proteins are prone to the formation of inclusion bodies, then the pellet should be dissolved with a high concentration of urea after lysis, and then the solution is columnar chromatography. Under their guidance, we referred to relevant papers and made a discussion with them on whether the Protocal was feasible. Finally, we were able to purify the spider silk protein that meet our demands.

2) Additional recommendations

At the very beginning of our project, we established contact with WHU-China. We initially intended to provide cheaper and better raw material of spider silk protein for 3D-printed bio-inks. And they offer us some suggestions to highlight our project and improve our work efficiency:

• Whether we need to find an outsourcing company for the extraction of protein raw materials;
• How much spider silk protein can we produce at one time, and how many times we are supposed to repeat in order to achieve the effective extraction amount required for bio-ink;
• Evaluate the technological cost needs to facilitate future commercialized application.

3. Collaboration with ZJUT-China on wiki

We have participated in the meet up with ZJUT-China at Hangzhou Precision Medicine Center and collaborate with each other on wiki production and HP. As they needed special interviewees to conduct an interview, we help them complete the HP questionnaire as interviewees. Especially when it comes to wiki collaboration. Their team leader who took part in last year's competition was quite experienced in working on wikis.

Solutions of the daunting problems about Wiki

When we seeked for specific help from ZJUT-China on wiki editing , they told us that they have made an editor corespondent to the changes of the wiki editing platform , which can convert text from template to html. We can easily upload photos and videos and other files on this new wiki platform. And they have fixed some bugs and came up with a beta version during the testing phase.Our wiki editors also engaged in the testing process and shared their wiki-making applets.

4. BNUZH-China's overall guidance and assistance to our project

The BNUZH-China team is committed to developing a biodegradable skin regeneration scaffold system (BCAID) based on bacterial cellulose, which can promote the healing of severely-burned skin wounds. And that project is similar to our project in terms of application, bringing us a lot of practical guidance and help. Relevant details and our attitudes have already been put on the HP page.

5. Collaboration with Wordshaper-HZ

During the experiment in the summer vacation, Wordshaper-HZ and our team were in the same experimental platform. During the transformation process, we encountered difficulties and could not express the positive clones we wanted. Under such circumstance, Wordshaper-HZ sent us their receptive states as a control to check what went wrong in the experiment. It turns out that our receptive states have been improperly stored and deactivated and we really appreciated their help.

6. Collaboration with RS_United_China on HP

RS_United_China met Chen Zelu, the leader of our wet team, and soon we shared our projects and competition experience. We found they have some difficulties with HP, so we were willing to share our experiences on HP and show them how to coordinate the work more effectively. At the same time, they learned that we could not find an experimental protocol for protein purification and they generously provided us with relevant information about the experimental protocol for protein purification.