Overview
Alone, his strength is limited, unity is strength, impregnable. This year, with the belief above, our team partnered up with 2022 BJWZ-China team. We have worked together for years and we share the same instructors. Communication and discussion with them gave us quite a lot inspiration. In this way, we are really grateful for the chance to partner with them. On this page we have collected the main landmarks of the ongoing relation we had established with the team BJWZ.
Common goals
1. Exchange ideas of projects
2. Promote communication with the public
3. Facilitate proper modeling and wiki design
4. Exchange experiences of experiments
Stage1 Brain Storming
2022 April
We conducted our first meeting. We not only presented our ideas, but also received suggestion from each other. Meanwhile, our instructors’ words inspired us, "The prospect of synthetic biology is trendy, concise, and it should have significant impact". After this meeting, we both gained a clearer understanding of the direction of our brainstorming. Their brief but smart ideas also evoked our interests greatly and gave us inspiration.
Fig.1 First meeting of Brain-storming report
May
To improve our project designs, we two teams reported our progress to our instructors. They commented on the projects one by one. By aid of this meeting, we both had a clearer direction of improvements of our topics.
June
It was in the four meetings in June that we decided the topics. We discussed our best ideas and decided final project topics in the aid of each other and our instructors. According to the comments from the meetings, we searched for more relative literature.
Stage 2: Experiment Design And Laboratory
2022 July
Members of Team BJWZ visited our laboratories on and received training of experimental equipment and the security with us for a week. During the visit, we built a deep partnership and helped each other when learning various laboratory operations.
Fig.2 Two teams were receiving training
Fig.3 Two teams were undergoing training on western bolt
2022 September
We were ready for our monthly meeting on September 3rd. Firstly, we introduced our project improved design, experiment progress and HP. The BJWZ team also shared the detailed engineering of their project "Yeast with Ears to Hear the World", which was to build an auditory module in yeast to observe the response of yeast cells to sound waves and the impact of sound waves on their metabolism.
For laboratory, we reminded BJWZ that it was necessary to check whether the enzyme used for digestion excised the target gene or not. They also suggested that we could place the connected DNA fragments in the refrigerator at 4℃ overnight, if they failed to be transformed immediately. Besides, we also had several discussions about running glue tailings, transformed protocols, digestion tips, etc.
Fig.4 Members of BNU-China and BNUZH-China
Stage 3: Extended Corporation
Apart from the communication about wet lab and design, we expanded our partnership through sharing ideas and experience of human practice (HP), wiki, modeling and art design.
Human Practice
We discussed about how to map out well-orchestrated HP activities that enable participants to have in-depth communication with us and reached an agreement that it must be bidirectional, which means that the HP activities should not just be about exporting to the audience, but receiving their feedback to adjust the experimental design and values of the project. For example, BJWZ gave us some suggestions in the form of HP, such as we could give public lectures in the science museum where we might collect opinions. On this basis, we came out of our ways to conduct HP activities like conducting an outdoor activity in our school to promote our project. After that, we would get a sense of what the students thought of it. Additionally, we also designed questionnaires to get feedback of our project.
Art design
BJWZ-China and us shared a great many opinions about art design from start to finish. And we both approved that planning is the foremost task, which means we should know how to arrange tasks for team members as early as possible according to the actual situation (task volume, time conflict with daily learning, etc.). For example,we were supposed to plan in advance that either did we need to choose the best design amongmore than one people’s work, or it only required one team member to complete.
Along with project progressing, we noticed that keeping strengthen communication with other groups could make us work much more efficiently. For instance, we need a clear understanding of the project design to arrange our promotion video clips through immediate interaction with the experimental group. By knowing the plans and process of other groups in advance, we could adjust the progress of our group tasks. BJWZ-China also suggested us to control the overall creative style of wiki page.
Meanwhile, through different types of work, we both realized that as a non-professional, it is of necessity to timely use online video to update our own aesthetics and software skills. As long as we were task-oriented and hardworking, difficulties in learning software could also be conquered!!!
Modeling
Generally, mathematical modeling is a data-based, multidisciplinary topic that attempts to make a clear description/prediction of reality. Because members in charge of modeling in our team were professionally trained when studying in the College of Artificial Intelligence of our school, we gave a lot of advice to BJWZ-China. Furthermore, we gained a lot of new knowledge in the process of learning from each other:
①Model is built during an iterative process since the description/prediction needs to be specified sometimes while at other times, generalization should be considered instead.
②Modeling has to follow certain academic standard, like bibliography, measurements, and most importantly, original ideas, thus making it more compelling and easier to understand.
③Modeling demands cooperative endeavor throughout the whole process—talent wins games, but teamwork wins metals and awards. Specifically, modeling in iGEM is a subset of it. Therefore, despite the common requirements above, we concluded that the mathematical model had to be combined with biological perspectives, computational biology, thermodynamics, etc.
Wiki design
We reached a consensus that first of all, we need to determine the overall style of the web page according to the project design, and the determination of the style would affect the design of the entire web page. By learning the work of the best wikis in recent years together, we both settled on the design of the web frame and the functionality and effectiveness that would be achieved according to the team's capabilities. We reminded them that it was essential to pay attention to practical purposes and details but not fancy image, and to make trade-offs. At the same time, BJWZ-China reminded us of time planning, and shared us the errors they encountered while editing their web pages. Thanks to timely communication, we solved the problems that had arisen in a timely manner.
Fig.5 We shared ideas of wiki design online
We are really glad to have shared this exhausting but unforgettable iGEM season with team BJWZ. We are thankful for their useful insights in different aspects of the competition, from the wet lab to human practice. We wish them the best and a lot of success!
