Partnership
Partnership is the act of collaboration between two teams
with a shared vision to bring both their best fronts forward and work
effectively together towards a shared goal. This leads to mutual benefit of
both the parties by sharing of knowledge and a helping hand in times of need.
Embodying this spirit of partnership, our team worked with
IIT Delhi to bring our respective projects to fruitful conclusion. The IIT
Delhi team had approached us for mentorship as they had last participated three
years ago. The interactions started with us mentoring the team in the beginning,
on the lines of team management and activities related to human practices.
Our teams met during the All India iGEM Meet and exchanged
our project ideas and developments. We realized that we shared common
ideologies and goals, with respect to dry lab, modelling, and education. Following
this meeting, we decided to partner with IIT Delhi over virtual set-ups.
Virtual meeting with IIT Delhi
Both teams worked on Mathematical and Structural Modelling
together and helped each other troubleshoot, at various instances dispersed
over a period of time, right from the development of our projects to the end.
IIT Delhi team was unable to generate oscillations during
the interaction of their proteins via mathematical modelling of their Biosensor.
We realized that the problem could be resolved by running a Fourier transform. Over
this discussion to hunt parameters, we received help from their team on a
couple of parameters crucial to our modelling.
We suggested IIT Delhi to contact Prof. Sundar to work on Schrodinger
for the structural model of lead-protein docking as metal protein docking is
not reliably supported by usual molecular docking software. This was a critical
suggestion to improve the reliability of their results and they have used Schrodinger
to run all their simulations. We have also found the structure for one of the
proteins that they modelled. IIT Delhi in turn has collated and shared a list
of resources on protein structural modelling to us, including links to various
software like AlphaFold2, UniProt, and Itasser. They have also shared a fast
LZerd protein-protein docking server and have provided simscale tutorials on
fluid flow modelling to us.
Our partnership was unique due to the sharing of goals
beyond the technical aspects of the project. Both the teams wished to
centralize and organize introduction to the subject of Synthetic Biology to high
school students. We aspired to reach out to centralized boards of education like
NCERT which sets up the curriculum for most government and private schools in
India. To reach out to these boards, we first decided to develop materials for
synthetic biology ourselves, which high school students would find interesting and
appealing enough to pursue the subject further. We planned on distributing and getting
feedback on these materials from students and teachers to assess the impact we
could have by introducing the subject right from high school. Results from the
sessions has helped provide a larger data set and helped IITD compile a more
comprehensive report to present to NCERT(India). IIT Delhi’s responses and session
feedback has helped us to understand the current student characteristics and
their level of knowledge in urban setup.
Joint workshop held by IIT Delhi and IISc Bengaluru
We had met Mr. Ramachandran R, IAS officer, earlier to discuss inclusion of synthetic biology in high school syllabus but he wasn’t convinced. Keeping in mind the feedback from these workshops, we plan to put forth a more robust request to add synthetic biology to the Pre-University College syllabus.
Reviews from the students after the workshop
Under the education initiative, IIScB and IITD worked collaboratively on the module and assessment sheet preparation. Both the teams continuously met to fine tune the content. Once the module was prepared, we worked on overall structure of the workshop, wherein we tried out multiple activities that could be conducted in schools, especially for 9th and 10th grade students. Following this, both teams held sessions in schools and NGOs, and compiled a report on the same.