One tree does not make a forest. In this season, we have made collaboration with OUC-China, NEU_CHINA, UESTC-BioTech, JLU_China and participated in the 9th Conference of China iGEMer Community(CCiC) and the Northeast Regional University iGEM Meetup. We not only learned a lot of knowledge from other projects that makes us pleasantly surprised, but also found and solved problems with each other. We did have made much progress during our collaboration.

Collaboration with OUC-China

During the experiments, our performance testing of the toxic genes was one step faster than OUC-China. In order to test the sacB gene in the eukaryotes and facilitate the process of OUC-China’s experiments in the meantime, we sent the plasmid harboring sacB gene and the relative information of the experimental conditions to OUC-China for further research.

As shown in figure 1A, OUC-China successfully introduced the 183 bp specific fragment of the sacB gene into Aureobasidium melanogenum.

As shown in figure 1B, the area ① was the one with the empty transformation plasmid, the area ② was the one with the sacB gene fragment transformation plasmid, and the area ③ was the one with 5 mM sucrose culture that was introduced with the sacB gene fragment transformation plasmid. We could see that the sacB gene has the toxicity of ontological expression and it did play a lethal effect when we added 5 mM sucrose. OUC-China verified that our inducible sacB also has toxic effects in eukaryotes to some extent, this preliminarily expanded the applicable objects of sacB.

Fig. 1. The results of the sacB gene used for OUC-China team. A：The gel picture for the plasmid with and without sacB gene fragment. B: The test for the toxic of sacB gene in Aureobasidium melanogenum.

Collaboration with NEU_CHINA

At the beginning of this season, we contacted with NEU_CHINA, and had the honor to invite the bilateral teachers and student leaders to an online meeting on April 17. During the meeting, the teachers and students made comments and suggestions on each other's projects and got in good contact. Our instruction teacher especially reminded NEU_CHINA to pay attention to biosafety issues and put forward views on plasmid construction and other issues.

June 27th, 2022, we took part in an online seminar on synthetic biology with NEU_CHINA and OUC-China.

Our discussion mainly focused on the following three parts:

1. Understanding of synthetic biology.

2. Links between projects of each team and synthetic biology.

3. How to popularize science of synthetic biology.

Through this discussion, we expanded our form and the content of our education work.(For more details, please click：education)

Collaboration with UESTC-BioTech

After learning that UESTC-BioTech's research uses the gene-editing tool CRISPR-Cas9, we gladly contacted them for further communication and invited them to test our model.

After more contacts and in-depth attempt later, they can provide some labeled data for our deep learning model, we decided to test our model with UESTC-BioTech's data. Both teams had similar results for off-target prediction. Our cooperation had verified that our model has good performance to a certain extent.

During our communication, we found that we have some deviations in our understanding of their model. After further in-depth exchanges, our ideas were unified, laying a good foundation for further cooperation. Then, they provided inspiration for our model design to find potential off-target sequences in the whole genome sequence.(Click here to visit their wiki)

Collaboration with JLU_China

We were honored to be invited to take part in the “2022: An Instruction Handbook for New Teams” activity which was held by JLU_China. We earnestly wrote our experience of the whole HP work and hoped our work can help more iGEMers from the bottom of our heart. Participated in this meaningful activity, we understood that the significance of our cooperation extra lies in helping future iGEMers.

Collaboration with The Conference of China iGEMer Community

The Conference of China iGEMer Community (CCiC) is a platform for the iGEMers in China to communicate, learn and demonstrate. The 9th CCiC was an online seminar lasting for 5 days (2022.8.18-22). We participated in the display of posters and presentation on August 19th, and our project was awarded the Best Model Award by CCiC on August 24th. We gained more confidence in our project through this community.

In addition, we took part in the CCiC iGEM Responsibility Program on August 20th and gave an account of the research dilemma during Human Practices. We initially started our research with the biological production of isopropanol, but found that there was overcapacity in isopropanol. So we were confused about how to further improve our Human Practices work. At that time, we fortunately gained warm, valuable and referential suggestions from iGEM Human Practices Program Officer, Yuhan Bao. He told us that the Human Practices's key work are reflection, response and responsibility. Our work did found a pivotal problem for the project, and the work done is not disheartening but very valuable to profound consider. After this discussion, we understood the significance of HP's work to the project, improved and perfected our team’s “close the loop” between what was designed and what was desired.

The Northeast Regional University iGEM Meetup

We participated in the Northeast Regional University iGEM Meetup together with NEFU_China, NEU_China, JLU_China and SYPHU_China. This meetup aims to further strengthen the cooperation and contact of iGEM teams among the northeast three provinces, build an academic exchange platform, and seek the possibility of offline cooperation during the pandemic. In the meeting, we gave brief project introduction and discussed the problems during HP and how to deal with.