During our iGEM journey, HS_China is the team that we collaborated with. With their help, we are able to learn more and achieve higher goals at a faster pace. We helped each other in many ways, including sharing a laboratory and having biweekly meetings and human practices. We first got to know each other in the laboratory learning experimental procedures and protocols. Since we shared the same laboratory, we were familiar with each other’s progress and could share opinions to adjust our experiments in time. We could check on each other’s performance and whether our experiments are conducted properly. In addition to that, we shared our thoughts on Human Practice activities, experiment suggestions and tips, and recent progress in biweekly meetings, which helped us to feel motivated and follow the plan. Moreover, we made a tight connection with members who conducted Human Practice in HS_China by helping with each other's brainstorming and research.
HUS_United POV:
With collaboration in labs, HS_China and we decided to work together on our human practices since we have accumulated a basic understanding of each other's projects during the lab sharing process. During the biweekly meetings of the two teams, we shared progress and intriguing ideas with HS_China, especially in human practices. Even if we were on different tracks, we still find it interesting and inspiring to work with HS_China because they can provide new thoughts by thinking from a different perspective and track. For example, when we decided to open an official account for our team's advertisement, we really had a difficult time deciding which type of content should be posted because our project's major audience is the community of iGEMers. During our discussion with HS_China, they suggested we post team and project introductions as the primary content of the Official Account just like they do. In addition to that, when we selected the introduction of synthetic biology as the theme of our following posts, HS_China provided their project as an example for us to cite to introduce the realistic application of synthetic biology. We researched together with HS_China's HP group member.
On the other hand, after we finished the slide show and speech for our education, HS_China was the first team that listened to our speeches and proposed valuable opinions. They suggested we include more videos or visual demonstrations in our slide show to attract young children's interest, which is a crucial part of a biology lecture. Their advice also helped us to make the content easy to understand from the perspective of people who did know synthetic biology at all before. We also played the role of an honest audience and a reliable adviser for HS_China's Human Practice activities. Throughout the program, we supported each other to a great extent in sharing opinions, research, and ideas on Human Practice activities and matetrials for construction work.
HS_China POV:
Being able to work in the same laboratory as HUS_United taught us a lot about sharing equipment and following each procedural protocols accurately in order to not affect the other team’s result and progress. We also helped each other a lot on minor but important details. For example, when someone forgot to take out a test-tube from the centrifuge, the other team would help in taking the solution out to make sure that the experiment went according to plan. This really saved a lot of time for both teams as we could not even count the number of errors and repeats we would have done without helping each other out.
Overall, HUS_United really helped us move forward in the experiments. Our collaboration in the labs built a base for further work in the future.