Partnership

First Meet in Southern China Regional Meeting

At the start of June, we, the CUHKSZ iGEM team, honorably received the invitation from the iGEM team SZU-China to attend the Southern China Regional Meeting. It provided us a chance to learn about other teams’ projects. Except for that, the members of SZU-China have led us to visit their campus/laboratory and share their plans for the experimental schedules. Thanks for this opportunity, we found that there were some similarities between the mutual team’s project. For example, our aims were both to try to use the synthetic biological method to detect some specific materials on the way of solving local problems. As the application site of their sensor is used in agriculture, which might be one of the application conditions in our future prospectus, we started the collaboration with them from then.

Human Practices leaders’ meeting

After the first interaction with SZU-China in Southern China Regional Meeting, it was delighted to find that both leaders of mutual leaders graduated from Shenzhen Foreign Languages School. Thus, at the end of August, an online meeting aimed to discuss the collaboration in Human Practices was held by the leaders of mutual Human Practices leaders. At the beginning of the meeting, we presented about the recent progress in Human Practices. Since our project aimed to create a fast, simple method for testing nitrite, the targeted user was hard to confine. Usually, our targeted people would be the public in general. We shared our confusion with them, and they helped us inspect our project purpose. They suggested that we could discuss the potential users with staff in the testing company to learn about the practical significance of our nitrisensor in the application of agriculture.

As both leaders of Human Practices in team CUHKSZ and team SZU-China graduated from the same senior high school, we invited them to do the co-education for the juniors in Shenzhen Foreign Languages School at the end of September.

Whole team members Meeting

In early September, we had an online meeting with SZU-China for the purpose of discussing the current progress and the obstacles that we encountered. We shared our ideas about hardware design as both of our team was developing a novel method of detection.

Except for that, their hardware leader has shared their problem in applying Arduino with us since both of us used such a device for measuring. To be more specific, they expressed the concern that there was a drawback within Arduino since the measurement of the transmitted signal could be interfered with by the environment. As our project has higher requirements for the accuracy in sensitivity and stability in the process of detecting nitrite, they suggested the necessity for us to figure out the causes of such interference and improve the sensitivity of our device by regulating the response time. Therefore, it is significant for our team to normalize and pre-process the raw data to generate a standard curve for nitrite concentration in Arduino. In addition, they helped us verify that we could finish the modeling works with the results of the hardware experiment.

Instruction for freeze-dried Powder Manufacture Process

In the previous meeting, we mutually thought that freeze-dried powder would be one of the good statuses for the storage of the bacteria for the respective project since it provided higher stability and a more extended conservation period. Our team shared our understanding of the procedure for producing freeze-dried powder based on our discussion with Ms. Chen, a post-doctoral researcher at CUHK(SZ). Also, we sent them a video that illustrated the process of using a freeze-dried powder machine, which was filmed by our team members.

Co-education for Shenzhen Foreign Languages School students

In order to let more people around us get to know about synthetic biology and its application, we organized a forum with SZU-China and Tongji-China to present our project to them. Such collaboration existed because there was one of the members of each iGEM team graduated from Shenzhen Foreign Languages School. We introduced the synthetic biology and projects of each iGEM team during the forum. There were about 40 senior high school students joined the forum. Also, we prepared a provocative and thoughtful question for them “What other areas that you think you could apply synthetic biology to encounter the obstacle.” Some students showed great interest in synthetic biology and posted some impressive answers to this question. (Click here> to see details about this Education Activity).

Interview with Prof. Chen Gang

From the previous meeting, we learned that SZU-China desired a chance to discuss shRNA and siRNA with a professor whose research field was focused on improving the RNAi treatment in the project. We invited professor Chen Gang from the School of Medicine| School of Life and Health Sciences, Chinese University of Hongkong, Shenzhen, to help them solve such questions. Professor Chen Gang has researched mainly nucleic acid, which might give them significant suggestions. With respect to the concern from SZU-China, he suggested that shRNA has higher stability for their experiment design as both sides of siRNA are exposed to nature, so it is easier to be degraded by RNA enzymes in the environment.

Moreover, Prof. Chen gave them two methods for improving stability. The first approach is to add another hairpin inside the shRNA, while another way is to add some small molecules with different covalent bonds to the open side of the shRNA to stabilize it. Such an interview with Prof. Chen has helped SZU-China a lot during the experiment design.

(Visit SZU_China Partnership)

First Online meeting with Tongji_China

In early April, we held an online meeting with Tongji_China to discuss topic selection for this year iGEM competition. After our team's brainstorming, we presented two topics to them. The first was the detection of nitrite, while another was the detection of glucocorticoids in cosmetics. However, they have pointed out that multiple rounds of antibody production are required to achieve a comprehensive detection range and high sensitivity to all glucocorticoid additives. Such experiment arrangements could not be finished in several months, which would increase the cost of time and delay the development of the project. More importantly, the manufacture of antibodies involves animal experiments, which has greater concerns in safety. After sincerely considering those two projects, we chose nitrite to be the topic of this year’s project.

With respect to the Tongji_China project, they illustrated two projects about the directed evolution of bromelain and lignin peroxidase treatment of melanin. One of our team members presented concern about whether they could achieve such a bleaching effect under mild conditions, as the bleaching experience was painful for some people. More importantly, the process of verification in experiment needed to finish in such a long period, which was very complicated.

Therefore, they chose bromelain as the central idea of their project. Since then, our partnership has been established.

Summer’s meeting with Tongji_China

During the summer holiday, we continued our communication with Tongji_China. As the main issues of mutual projects were dealing with the enzyme, we would perform similar experiments for verification. Due to the pandemic, Tongji_China could not finish the experiments during that time. To reduce the pressure involved in experiments, we had some discussions about the wet lab experiments.

At the first meeting, we shared the recent progress respectively and discussed the experiment design briefly. We have presented some variations in the plasmid design. Due to the consideration of the inclusion body, we degraded the promotor once before the experiment due to the high intensity of the initial one. We expressed such concern to them to help them fully consider and evaluate the design of the plasmid, which might partially reduce the stress in the future experiment.

At the end of the summer meeting, we held another meeting with them to discuss experimental design. We mainly presented our current processes of the qPCR experiments as the results of qPCR were unexpected after performing two rounds of experiments. They helped us analyze systematically whether our inconsistent results results were due to the unsuccessful extraction of total RNA, the inappropriate selection of internal reference genes or primer dimerization during the experiment. Also, they suggested we could try to do the RNA-Seq experiment to replace the qPCR. However, such an experiment needed a higher cost which was hard to afford.

Co-education for Shenzhen Foreign Languages School Students

In order to let more people around us get to know about synthetic biology and its application, we organized a forum with SZU-China and Tongji-China to present respective projects to them. Such collaboration existed because there was one of the members of each iGEM team graduated from Shenzhen Foreign Languages School. We introduced the synthetic biology and projects of each iGEM team during the form. There were about 40 senior high school students joined the forum. After that, we prepared a provocative and thoughtful question for them “What other areas that you think you could apply synthetic biology to encounter the obstacle.” (Click here> to see details about this Education Activity)

Online meeting with Tongji_China at the end of September

At the end of September, we held another online meeting with Tongji_China to discuss the process of wiki design and experiment. We shared our ideas on the arrangements of the wiki page and presented some technical issues involved with them. Both leaders in charge of the wiki have discussed a lot about how to improve the wiki design.

(Visit TJU_China Partnership)