Our first collaboration meeting was with team IISER Tirupati regarding the possibility of Wet-Lab Collaborations and feasibility of modeling strategies. Since both teams are working on aptamers, it was a very insightful discussion regarding the pros and cons of using SELEX as our selection strategy of aptamers and the expected timelines of our projects.
Our discussion with IISER Mohali had a common point regarding the use of aptamers in both the projects. Their work on neural computations was extremely interesting and we discussed their project’s scale-up in the industry. We moved on to discussing the modeling strategies of our project and discussed the feasibility of having the whole cell as our target. We brainstormed ideas on how we could select the positive and negative controls, in order to account for false positives and negatives in our output and analyses.
We discussed the feasibility of implementing the MAWS (Making Aptamers Without SELEX) and how we could generate the three-dimensional conformation of aptamers. We discussed the different strategies to predict the 3D structures of our target protein (FimH). We also discussed NU Kazakhstan’s excellent initiative to combine Synthetic Biology and Art, and the ethical issues regarding surveys that both teams had planned to propagate.
We reached out to Team Rochester, who are also working on aptamers, regarding some guidance in the modeling strategy. The lack of substantial common points between the projects helped us move on to Human Practices and the prospects of having a comic-book panel or the meme competitions to extend awareness regarding the use of aptamers in synthetic biology.
IISER Thiruvananthapuram has greatly and significantly helped us work out the logistics of Human Practices and the outreach regarding Women’s Health and Synthetic Biology.
Our collaborator and partner, ICT Mumbai, has supported us throughout the duration of our project. Starting from the All India iGEM Meet (AIIM) held in IISc Bangalore, their consistent support has been thoroughly appreciated by us. We partnered with them on improving the presentation of our project on our website and in the modelling aspects, regarding the screening and docking of aptamers with our target protein. Our partnership with the team during the project helped us finish the milestones we planned. We helped them with developing their wiki. We had brainstorming sessions on how to design responsive layouts for the wiki page and include dynamic elements, along with better loading animation of the content for the web pages. They helped us gain insights into new modelling techniques and tools for the structure prediction of DNA aptamers. They offered to help spread our survey to areas local to their institute and help us garner responses from a larger demographic. We offered to spread their questionnaire regarding the 5 'UTR libraries amongst our faculty and research fellows.
