Overview

This year, we have formed two partnerships with YiYe-China and ZJUT-China. We have conducted in-depth communication in different groups, which has played an important role in the project.

YiYe-China

The First Sight - A Meet-Up in HZAU

The two teams have been in contact since 2018. This year happened to have similar themes. Both themes are about blood-related diseases. We then made a collaboration. As both of the teams are in Wuhan, we held an offline meet-up at HZAU-China in compliance with the epidemic prevention and control regulations.

At this meeting, two teams introduced the project to each other and asked questions to provoke thoughts. For example, the impact of AI of B pathway by-products on human body (YiYe-China's question) and the effectiveness of MDS detection methods (HZAU-China's question). Both two teams gave their opinions respectively. YiYe-China cited papers of 2014, HZAU-China suggested YiYe-China to use the updated papers. Timeliness is very important in scientific research. After that, YiYe-China paid more attention to the timeliness of the paper.

Subsequent Cooperation - Online

Due to the COVID-19 policy, we could not communicate offline at will, but we tried our best to reduce the impact of the epidemic, and we continued to maintain contact online frequently.

Model

We suggested YiYe-China to expand the experimental data size on the principle of model, and helped YiYe-China to improve their Experiment and Model modules.

For YiYe-China's testing products, we suggested that YiYe-China to add a module for testing TMAO or TMA to detect the possibility of serious thrombotic events. This suggestion has provoked their thoughts, led them to make improvements.

Human Practice

For public education, we together with YiYe-China held a Bilibili Live. See more details in: Education

ZJUT-China

This year, our team and the ZJUT-China team have established a close working relationship during the competition. Our two teams engaged in extensive discussions and collaborations to improve each other's experimental design, modeling, and human practice.

May

First acquaintance: In mid-May, we contacted ZJUT-China due to similar projects. It was designed with probiotics as engineered bacteria which has many similarities in many ways.

July

During this period, we often shared our project and laboratory progress with ZJUT-China through the Internet, and made suggestions for each other's experiments.

On the human practice side, we discussed whether oral probiotics or gut probiotic programs would inevitably take into account dietary habits, after which we mutually agreed to give feedback on our findings in this regard for follow-up human practice research.

August

On August 13th, we had a discussion through the Tencent conference on the use of the Cre-LoxP system and various problems we had encountered during the experiment. Meanwhile, the deficiency of the P7Z6 plasmid was proposed. Significant effect had been brought that the P7Z6 plasmid was delivered from ZJTU-China on August 27, and then it was used to construct a dual-fluorescence reporter system which aimed to test the cutting efficiency of the Cre-LoxP system.

In addition, since our team had completed the design of ComDE and similar systems in our past projects, we shared with them the relevant literature on modeling two-component systems. In addition, during the communication with ZJUT-China they suggested us the idea that we could try to reduce the concentration of TMA in two directions in order to achieve better therapeutic effects: TMA degradation and TMA production, which provided us with ideas for the establishment of virtual screening models.

September

On September 13, ZJUT-China held a numerical model exchange meeting with HZAU-China to discuss the establishment and problems of numerical models, and to introduce to them the experience of establishing two-component system models and to suggest their models. Based on their suggestions, we finally established the proposal to inhibit TMA production by virtual screening of CutC inhibitor lead compounds through the numerical model, and we had an in-depth communication about this in this meeting to improve the specific ideas. In addition, we discussed how to mathematically model the Cre-LoxP system, and although the model was not completed, it provided us with ideas for future work.

In human practice part, we communicated with ZJUT-China in the intestinal information platform. They asked some questions about oral and gut health and probiotics, and we recommended after them and discussed with them.