On July 25th, it was a great honor for team H-Metal Silence from Fujian to have an online collaboration with team De-PETer (Beijing_United) from Beijing through the iGEM. The meeting went well in the whole process. We both thought it was a great opportunity to make different teams learn better from each other. Through this campaign, we are also deeply involved and encouraged by the future development of biotechnology.
Figure 1.We were in the online meetup with the De-PETer team (Beijing_United)
We took the first to introduce our team’s name, logo, and understanding of the goal. Then, we shared our offline campaigns like selling balloons and water in order to collect funds. Even we thought it was quite toilsome and time-consuming work. We still insisted of learning from practicing was a good way for personal growth, especially for members of the dry team. Regarding the educational campaign, we strongly recommended that team De-PETer could hold some offline speeches and other project promotions. These campaigns have both educational and social benefits.
After our introduction, team De-PETer also introduced their basic message to us. Besides, the team De-PETer expressed their appreciation for our high proficiency and fluency as well as organized speech arrangement. They also shared a very precise business plan which inspired us a lot. We appreciated the idea they said— they do not want to produce the enzyme themselves, instead, they will continually offer the technology and outsource the production. This method will avoid the challenges due to their scarcity of professional knowledge of industrial production so that they could focus on upgrading the incipient technology. It can also reduce the risk of losing capital and wages on the production line. At the end of the meeting, we invited each other to complete surveys to enlarge the sample numbers as well as giving feedback to each other.
Moreover, our collaboration did not only exist in this online meeting. Team leaders from both sides held a WeChat talk group to have deeper conversations. After having a deeper understanding of each other’s project progress, we gave our suggestions on their market pricing which they might need to listen to the consumers to see how is their opinion.
All in all, it was quite fun and educational for both new who wanna start up a business. They are an awesome and competitive team, so we attached great importance to this collaboration. We are both looking forwards to the eventual good news from each other.
Nowadays, wine has become an indispensable part of the lives of a subset of the population. But there have been quite a few studies that have shown that wine could do harm to the human body, in which the chief culprit is higher alcohol, which refers to one of the main metabolic byproducts produced by Saccharomyces cerevisiae during the process of fermentation. And if the content of higher alcohol is relatively high in wine, when drinking, people will easily feel a negative state of thirst, headache, and so on. So the Ø-HAS team (Shanghai_Metropolis) decided to be committed to developing a technology to reduce the number of genes that can synthesize higher alcohols in this strain of Saccharomyces cerevisiae. At the same time, they revealed that the specific research method they used was directional homologous recombination technology. On July 27th, we met the Ø-HAS team in an online conference.
Figure 2. We were in the online meetup with the Ø-HAS team (Shanghai_Metropolis)
This collaboration meeting lasted almost an hour and we exchanged valuable experiences. Each of us introduced our team and demonstrated our recent progress. We learned that the Ø-HAS team members had completed a concurrent survey through the questionnaire. In return, we provided with the Ø-HAS team some ideas for improvement on questionnaires, as well as some suggestions for street trafficking activities. They also completed the design work for the periphery goods and team gowns. The wet team members of the Ø-HAS team provided a nuanced account of their 2-day experimental progress. We were impressed by the teamwork between the wet lab and dry lab.
Finally, we reached the following conclusions at our team's relapse after this collaboration: a great advantage is reflected in the teamwork ability of the Ø-HAS team, while they have a very clear concept of their understanding of the topics and products of their own project, but they may still need more time to formulate their next arrangements for work and the refinement of the materials concerned.
We are looking forward to more collaboration with the Ø-HAS team, and we sincerely hope they will achieve deep progress after this meeting.
