Our team is glad to have discussed this with other iGEMers! We believe that it helped both parties to get more insight into their projects whilst also making new friends along the way.
“Intestinal Alliance” is the main theme for collaboration.
In total, HS_China has collaborated with 5 teams (LZU_China, HS_China, LZU_HS_PRO_A, WS_HZBIOX, NEU_China) to host an online event named “Gastrointestinal Alliance” or “Gut Alliance”. The goal of this event was to meet with different teams working on intestinal microbiology and discuss the potential improvements to be made for each team. The collaboration was split up into 3 sections: project sharing, education from a gastrointestinal doctor, and spreading awareness using flyers.
Project Sharing:
The more the merrier! More than 100 igemers and non-igemers attended an online meeting that aimed at spreading awareness and information about different gastrointestinal diseases. As participants of the Gastrointestinal Alliance, we presented our project on Lactose intolerance by first walking over a few basics of lactose intolerance, such as its pathologies and symptoms, before introducing our method to cure lactose intolerance.
Apart from us, all other teams presented and we each gave feedback on each other’s presentational skills, content ideas, and work that we would anticipate in the following weeks (the event was hosted in the middle of July). Our main source of feedback came from the team LZU_China as they have greatly helped us by giving insightful advice on the overall experiment procedures as they happened to work on a similar project. LZU_china raised the point that there was a real need in starting the lab work quickly and efficiently as the use of e coli powder encased in intestinal-soluble capsules would be hard to make.
Education from GI doctors:
To learn more knowledge about the field of intestinal biology and its medical applications, we invited 2 main guest speakers to discuss gastrointestinal biology with us.
Speakers include:
Dr. Wei, a professor from the life science and medicine department of Northwestern University
Dr. Dong, Xiamen fifth people’s hospital’s dean of the nursery department
All three doctors covered a few basics about gastrointestinal microbiology whilst sharing their experiences being gastrointestinal doctors. Dr. Dong opened our eyes to what it meant to be a physician but also suggested that a lot of the ideas would revolutionize the work if it reached the clinical treatment stage.
Since our project is a cure, the best outcome for this idea would be to be applied in clinical treatments. However, Dr. Dong also gave us a warning about the implications and responsibilities of developing technology. As the frontline of healthcare, all three of our speakers transmitted to us what it meant to have the life of a patient in our hands.
Spreading Awareness
In collaboration with other teams, we designed flyers that aim at giving additional information on Lactose intolerance. Written in the format of a blog, the flyers helped communicate the content that we did not cover during our presentations, whilst also giving a chance for our project to spread without constant participation. With the help of NWU_China_A, we distributed those flyers both online, and on social media, but also physically, to raise awareness of the importance of Lactose Intolerance. After all, the flyers were distributed, we knew that our project on lactose intolerance had reached a numerous amount of people, both inside and outside the field of synthetic biology.
Overall, We consider the collaboration done with all members of the “Intestinal alliance” as a success, as we accomplished many of the goals we initially set. All of the members enjoyed listening to each other’s presentations and a lot were fascinated by the lecture given by the gastrointestinal doctor. Additionally, our goal of building trust and friendship with other teams was accomplished through the intestinal alliance.
Although we were successful in many areas, there are some areas for improvement. The collaboration done with other teams could have been deeper as we could have kept long-term contact with all the teams, especially the ones that gave us feedback during our presentation. Moreover, more guest speakers could have been invited as we possessed the resources to call upon several enterprises that worked in the field of lactose intolerance. One-on-one time with each of the teams would have facilitated conversion. The speaker presentations were mostly lecture-based, which could be a point of improvement as discussions would be more fluent if given more time and potentially a smaller audience.
In conclusion, we realized that this event may not have been the best opportunity for forming collaborations, which was one of our main goals for the event. In the future, it may be valuable to add more events for collaborations and host activities offline to strengthen the bond created between different igem teams.
Here is a link to NWU_CHINA_A’s wiki: https://2022.igem.wiki/nwu-china-a/collaborations
Donation to the icjfls team:
We donated a plasmid pET-R0010-KP-SP-LacZ to the icjfls team, making their recombinant plasmid construction easier and faster.
In their project, icjfls planed to use LacZ gene to construct a recombinant plasmid pET-28a-toehold switch-LacZ, which was desired to express β-galactosidase triggered by miRNA 34a-5p. After understanding that our team’s project is related to the problem of lactose intolerance, in which a plasmid containing LacZ was used. We received a demand from the icjfls team to give them this plasmid containing LacZ gene. It was a great experience sharing resources with this team full of talented researchers just like us!
Here is a link to the collaboration page of the icjfls team.