It was such a good surprise for us to find another team working on
Alzheimer’s disease, so we had a common goal throughout the season to
spread awareness about the disease including causes, symptoms,
treatment, and our projects.
We shared the ideas of our projects, and found out we were working on the
same protein, Tau, but they were working on it from a diagnostic point of
view. As we were working on the same protein, there were several
meetings between us where we discussed various points about it, like its
sources, isoforms, and role in AD, they even agreed to let us use their Tau
expression protocol and tell us what troubleshoots they faced.
Our partnership didn’t stop at the scientific level, we looked over the human
practices we could do together, and that resulted in them translating our
awareness video about AD and our book (Zekra) into their language
(Swedish).
1st meeting (23-5-2022)
Regarding that they also work on Tau protein, we decided to discuss the
differences between our system and their system, they told us that they will
extract Tau from tears so, we advised them to make sure that Tau protein
is found in tears and look up its isoform. We also brainstormed about the
human practices plan.
Meeting outcome: We decided to be partners.
2nd meeting (16-6-2022)
They told us that they decided to work on the 0N4R isoform of Tau and that
they wouldn’t work on beta-amyloid protein and they gave us the contact of
their PI to help us in the Tau expression protocol.
We asked them to participate with us in our video about AD awareness in their language.
Meeting outcome: We set a successful awareness plan.
3 rd meeting (1-8-2022)
We received the Swedish version of our video and asked them to translate
our book (Zekra) that we had made about AD.
This meeting had a long discussion about tau isoforms and the expression
and purification protocols we had received.
Meeting outcome: Optimization of the tau.
4th meeting (10-9-2022)
In this meeting we talked more about the wet lab protocols and
troubleshooting they had faced while expressing tau protein, they told us
that they made two batches. The first batch didn’t yield too much
(Sonication was done one time) while the second batch was more
successful (Sonication was done one time). We were informed that they
didn’t work on the aggregated tau but used its native disordered form
instead.
Tau purification was carried out through magnetic beads, and for
characterization, they used native gel (For molecular weight determination),
protein dialysis and GFP (For visualization).
Patras-med team had reached out to us on Instagram to collaborate with
them on a human practices project. We held a meeting with them after and
realized that we were both working on chronic diseases, so we decided that
this would be a wonderful chance for our human practices plans to collide.
Throughout the season we both participated in each other’s attempts to
spread awareness about iGEM and the projects we were working on, like
their video about iGEM, their board game, our AD video, our miniGEM
competition, and our diary book (Zekra).
Our meetings
In the first meeting (8-5-2022) we discussed our project’s ideas and we told
them the types of software that could help them with their idea.
Then on the 19th of May, they told us about a board game that they had
done about chronic diseases and they asked us to add 20 questions about
AD and translate the questions of the game into our language (Arabic).
11th of June we asked them to collaborate with us on the video we had
made about AD (in their language which is Greek) and they asked us to
collaborate in their video about iGEM explaining the following:
• Why did we participate in iGEM?
• What’s our iGEM track?
• How do we provide solutions in a synthetic biology way?
We both worked on the videos and shared them together later that month.
On the 10th of August, we asked them to join our mini competition
(MiniGEM) which mimics the iGEM competition, to present their project’s
idea. On the competition day (27th of August), they joined our competition
presenting their project idea to the judges and the rest of the audience.
Teams here in Egypt face a lot of difficulties in their iGEM journey, so this partnership was very important for us to have each other’s backs and overcome any hardships either of us could face.
• AFCM team invited us to their meet-up to spread knowledge about the participating African teams in iGEM. We heard from AFCM their presentations about synthetic biology, we presented our project explaining our two systems to other teams, mentors, instructors, and a group of doctors in bioinformatics and other fields. This day was fruitful and full of great information as each group showed an incredible side of science: the teams’ members or the doctors’.
• We provided them with some of our IDT grant (The 20Kbp), for them to complete their project.
• They added a valuable chapter to our book ‘Zekra’ that is about AD awareness.