William & Mary
This year, the Gastonday-Shangde iGEM team built a strong partnership with the William and Mary iGEM team. Over the course of this year, apart from routined communication through email, our team had several online zoom meetings with the William and Mary iGEM team too. Both teams introduced their projects during the first meeting, and we discussed how we could help each other throughout our project. After proposing the ideal collaboration we could carry out, each team spent some time working on the partnered part of the projects and later arranged a follow-up meeting to report the progress. As part of our project, we will be trying to design a production system of intermediates through the phenylalanine-to-cinnamaldehyde pathway. Since we use E. coli as part of the metabolic system, we need to increase the growth rate of E. coli if we want our system to have high efficiency. Besides, a higher growth rate can also shorten the time consumption of each experiment and allow us to do more testing sets during the restrained time. As a team focusing more on human practice and wet lab, we currently lack members with a high understanding of modeling. However, the William and Mary iGEM team generally focuses more on modeling in their project. During one of our follow-up meetings, they reported their progress on our partnered part, presenting a side system they created for our team. This metabolic model of E. coli they made provides help for our team and improves our ability not only in the engineering success part but also in the implementation part. In return, our team developed feedback on the main part of their developed system, provided suggestions that allowed them to make their system more user-friendly, and helped them decide which needs to prioritize in their system’s design.
