Section 1 : Transformation

1.1 Introduction of team Tsinghua

Team Tsinghua comes from Tsinghua University consisting of students majoring in multidiscipline. This year they made an exploration in the field of reproductive health, hoping to develop a sperm quality detection chip to decline male reproductive health. Tsinghua University also involved the Pmr system in the wet lab design, and has a series of collaborations with our team.

1.2 Partnership

Our relationship with THU stems from the two-component system we both chose to use, Pmr, which is highly versatile and scalable and can be applied to a variety of protein detection scenarios. After learning about each other's project designs, we quickly conducted our first online meeting to introduce our projects to each other.

1.2.1 Wet lab

(1) Early trials

In THU’s early trials, they conducted a project on laccase. It is opportune that our team had used laccase components in previous projects, so we sent THU the components at that time, which allowed them to conduct the experiments quickly.

(2) Experimental stage

During the experimental stage, we communicated a lot about the experimental details. When it comes to the timing of induction and expression of the Pmr system, we gave THU some advice based on our previous experience to help them to troubleshoot some possible problems during the experiment. It is worth mentioning that as THU encountered the problem of poor system stability in the construction of the Pmr two-component system, we exchanged with them the experiments designed in the strength validation of the two-component system, and provided them with the map of our plasmid constructs at their request, which aimed to assist them to find if there was a problem in the design of the primary sequence of the receptor.

After obtaining some experimental basis, we exchanged plasmids with Tsinghua and asked them to verify whether the GolS system could successfully and persistently anchor the target protein to the membrane. The figures from Tsinghua validated that we achieved ideal results. And we also helped Tsinghua complete two induction experiments to investigate whether the nisin system could maintain its effectiveness even under different contexts after they sent relevant plasmids and reagents to us. It turned out that the results are similar to what they did in their own lab.

1.2.2 Dry lab

In terms of dry laboratory, we encountered the problem of figure layout on the web page. Noticing that Tsinghua acquitted splendidly on wiki optimization, we consulted them on the improvement of our wiki and they provided optimized advice which we really appreciated.

1.2.3 University ‘s culture communication

To memorize our partnership, our two teams drew a logo using the cartoon image of two young iGEMers performing high fives, which represented the two teams' consensus reached on the projects. The souvenirs of HUST and THU promoted two teams to get an in-depth understanding of the other university’s culture.

Section 2 : Collaborations with other teams

2.1 Cooperations in central China

Being invited by WHU-China, we participated in the meeting named 2022 Central China iGEM Comunication on July 30th with CUG-China, HBUT-China, and HZAU-China. With joint efforts, this meeting provided us with the precious opportunity to exchange sparkling project design ideas and solutions to tackle the problems we met during the experiments. 15-minute presentations and thorough communication were conducive to the cooperation and the subsequent development of projects. The questions of WHU-China and HZAU-China inspired us to work on the perfection of our project from model and part optimization.

2.2 Cooperations in Shanghai

Considering Shanghai’s universities outstanding contributions in the field of scientific research, we contacted the teams from FDU and SJTU to communicate the ideas of their projects. And we really appreciate their innovative design and benefit a lot through online contacts.

2.2.1 Fudan’s project

FDU’s project Rester centers on Vitamin A, an effective skincare reagent but with possible side effects. Their modified cell factories, which feature phase separation and enzyme anchoring, contain the reaction route of beta-carotene, retinal, and retinol through consecutive enzymatic reactions with appropriate efficiency. It would underlie the production of Vitamin A derivatives that overcome the instability and hazard issues of normal Vitamin A forms in skincare products. They aim to ease people’s financial burden on skincare, and ultimately help them regain confidence in careers and life.

2.2.2 SJTU-BioX-Shanghai’s project

SJTU-BioX-Shanghai is exploring the intriguing combination of DNA data storage technology and the novel application scenario of interstellar communication with the help of synthetic biology. They establish an improved method to encode information transported within the bacterial genome, employ spore display technology and bioengineering transformation system to establish an information container, and analyze information retrieval rate by a specific algorithm to achieve their goals.