Attributions





Team Overview


LINKS_China Team Logo

We are a group of 47 high schoolers from everywhere around China who got together at Shen Zhen, China, where our lab is located at. We experienced a lot of difficulties both in term of experiment, hp, wiki, and arts, and management of the team. There have been several changes in leadership positions and multiple times when the person assigned a task did not finish that task adequately. Fortunately, in such times of emergency, there are always proactive members who assume these responsibilities even though they are nominally neither in that sub-team nor a student leader. We would never be able to put together such a huge project and without these members.





Chart of contributions


Wet Lab Contributions Chart

Human Practice Contributions Chart

Dry Lab Contributions Chart

Art Contributions Chart

Wiki Writing Contributions Chart





We appreciate the support from every team member…


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Alisa
I participatited in lab experiments on MAAs; contributed to modeling by researching relevant data (kinetics of enzyme); wrote wiki pages of Sustainability, What are MAAs, a few other pages, and translated part of the lab notebook as well as protocols; editted part of the promotion video; did a presentation of Public Education.
Alisa was the de facto head coordinator of our team in our most deperate times: she sacrificed great sleep time and energy into writing several wiki pages during the week of wiki freeze when nobody else shouldered these responsibilities. Alisa was always there to save the day: she edited and uploaded both our promotion video and presentation video under high level of stress in less than 8 hours, and memorized our entire 15-minute script for our presentation video just to ensure she would played the animations and flipped pages at the exact right time. We are forever thankful for her attribution!

Su Junzhe
Take most part during the experiment , helping the construction of plasmid in saccharomyces cerevisiae. Also the experiment of extracting MAAs from agar and the improvement of the experiment. Creating the imformation library of the gene parts designed by the team, and the introduction and education of the project in other high schools.
Leo and Andrew (below) were our de facto experiment leaders from August all the way to the end of iGEM. Leo spent a lot of time in the lab, often rushing to the lab the second school ended. He took over writing parts of our judging form, wiki wet lab, and scripting and recording parts of our presentation video when the student who promised to to these tasks did not. Without Leo and Andrew's immense attribution, we definitely wouldn't be able to win best part collection and best new basic part.

ANDREW
I participated in extensive amounts of experiments of both MAA production and sunburn repair from July to October. Additional to writing proposed implementations of the judging form and editing other entries, I also wrote the wiki pages of engineering success, measurement, proof of concept, the sunburn repair section of the description, and parts of the impact grant. Moreover, I participated in writing the scripts and act for multiple planned versions of the promotion video and the design and optimization of our educatiinal game. I was also the chief organizer for the Synthetic Biology/iGEM project exhibition and mini-lecture delivered to my school community.
During the last month of iGEM, Andrew spent so many late evenings doing experiments and writing and revising the wiki pages that he proactively volunteered to write that his mom almost threatened not to allow him to come to the lab on school days anymore. In addition to the aforementioned attributions, he also recorded an explanation video for our , and brought so much laughter to the lab in our most stressful times.

Xu Yongxi
As the leader of experiment group, I serve as the main speaker of iGEM South China conference which is held in Shenzhen University in the early stage of the project. As for the management of experiment, I participate in lab experiments and I am in charge of experiment plan, including communication with PI and the weekly report about the experiment theory and progress which can help our team members have a more comprehensive understanding of our experiment. As for the contribution to wiki, I am the writer of experiment design (MAAs Part) and the project background on homepage. At the same time, I take part in HP group and have an interview with the worker in State food and Drug administration and I also write the interview result on wiki.

Kevin
As the team leader of the experiments, I led a large number of experiments in the early and middle stages of the experiment. Integrating experimental content and reporting to the team are my weekly duties. In addition, I did a pre-experiment on the hardware section and wrote the Safety Section of our Wiki page.

Cissy
I am responsible for designing and researching for the overall experiment plan for UV-repair portion, and have participated vigorously in experiments at the early and middle stage of the experiment. moreover, I have also participated in Human Practice events such as visiting Lantern Corporation and communicating with other iGEM teams related to my part of the experiment (such as SZPT) , and are also responsible for constituting the design and various sections on the judging form. I am generally resposible for promoting (such as writing introduction articles to publishing on our team's official accounts) and developing the UV repair section of this year's experiment.

Dora
As the student leader of HP, I participated in the weekly team reporting as well as the planning and execution of all Human practice activities of the team. This incudes visiting lantern, contacting and interviewng experts, and planing market invetigations. My main job was to ensure that HP team members are actively participating and that our Human practice activities were well planned and executed. In the later stage of our project, I'm respnosible for writing the wiki description of a interview and also the integration of all HP related documents. Beyond that, I'm also involved in writing the Judging form for IHP and in participating educational activities at the school. Finally, I will be participating in our team's project presentation.

April
I participated in wet lab experiments for two weeks fully. Being the design leader, I had been mainly responsible for managing the art section for the team; including assigning tasks to group members for design, organizing meetings and following all the tasks to make sure they are on track. I personally contributed to the home page initial design, promotion video's perimitive version design, designing the members page, making posters for exhibitions, and arranging the formatting of the articles for our Wechat official account. I was also responsible for the interview with the sailing team about their perceptions towards sunscreen and recorded it with text.

Suri
In our team LINKS_China2022, I mainly contribute to the experiment part and the artisitic design of the wiki. I participated in early experiments and the ending part of the experiment, including early transformation of the yeast, redoing the later part for better results. What's more, as the advisor of the advertising part, I was in charge of the main design of all the wiki page and our team's peripheral products. I also made contribution to writing the safety part in our wiki page.
Suri drew SO MANY THINGS during the weeks of wiki freeze. Can you believe she drew our splendid home page in less than 24 hours while occupied with school work? Whenever your exclaim at the aethetics of our wiki, you have Suri and other members of our graphics team to thank!

Ada
I wrote the impact grant for our team, made the ppt about our project for our discussion with Lantern, prepared questions to ask professionals at Lantern, actively participated in our visit to Lantern, and documented this whole activity for our wiki page. I also wrote, illistrated, and revised two articles for Links' WeChat official account; I also designed the layout for one of them. I wrote, revised, and finalized our safety form. I help design our poster for exhibiton and translated the poster into English. I also wrote the homepage for our wiki and proofread and revise all final drafts. As the Engineering team leader, I oversee wiki construction, hardware construction, and modeling. I am one of the main contributors of our wiki. I actively discuss with our wiki construction team and our arts team to design, code, fix problems, and finalize everything on our wiki. For hardware, I oversee the purchasing of UV light beads and help with the construction of our astable multivibrator. For modeling, I contact two upperclassmen and arrange learning sessions with them. I then assign the data that need to be looked up to our modeling team, oversee their progress, and keep in corresspondence with SCIE concerning our partnership. I am also in charge of writing the judging form for harware and modeling and part of these two sections on our wiki.

Lisa
I was the main operator of the sunburn repair group for more than 2 months.I coordinated students ,pushed the development of the project. I was responsible for education,collaboration and partnership.I planed the joint exhibitons, online meetings,and cooperated with other teams for experiments,human practice,modeling,ect.I wrote nine documents of the judging form and wiki page,and was the initial person in charge of keeping track of our members'contributions.

Sophia
In the LINKs_China team, I contributed to the planning and excuting of many human practice activities, especially focused on creating the initial survey then writing its analysis and acting as a liaison with the National Medical Products Administration. I was also part of the team that prepared the educational exhibition in my school. As a part of the design team, I mainly focused on creating cartoon portraits of team members to be placed on the wiki and was also involved in illustration and animation. I spent roughly two weeks helping with experiments in the lab.
Sophia and April (above) drew SO MANY THINGS as well-including the avatars for all our 47 members. Moreover, Sophia helped drew the demo pictures for our hardware in less then 2 hours and helped type down Ada's explanation for hardware on the night of the fist wiki freeze when Ada was FRANTICALLY multitasking.

Leo
I'm one of the main contributors to the wiki site and its completion, such as coding the navbar, sidebar, and many different parts. I also participated in many experiments on MAAs production for a total of two weeks, then joined the Sunburn Repair group, helped the group search for important information, did experiments for about three weeks to get significant results, and wrote the lab notebook for the Sunburn Repair parts.

Hugo
I am one of the main contributors to the wiki of our team. I contributed by being the key developer, uploader, and editor of the contents and codes in our team's wiki. I also participated in some experiments of sunburn repair and MAA production for around 5 weeks. Lastly, I contributed to our team's model by researching important data for the completion of it. I also wrote the modeling section of our team's wiki.

Tina
As a member of Links China experiment group, I spent around 5 weeks and most of the weeends during summer holiday in the lab, refining some key experiments for early stage MAA production repetitively to get the best result. I helped to write and correct the experiment protocol and record the progress to help my team members understand the whole process, while guiding them through experiments that they are not familiar with in the lab. I was also responsible for cooperating with other teammates to write the experimental principle part of promotion video script. I participated in the Human Practice part by visiting Lantern, the cosumetics company, for interviews.

Cassie
I participated in the experiments for more than two weeks, and contributed to both the pre-paper search and the practical part of the experiments for MAA extraction and post-sunburn repair, so I have a basic understanding of the main lines of the experiments. At the same time, I also followed up the activities of human practice, such as the planning of some of the activities, writing and finishing of the text, and I was responsible for the layout and copywriting of the public website in terms of publicity, and also participated in the production of some of the promotion videos.

Oliver
Throughout the year, I've participated in tasks regarding multiple aspects. My proficiency in language renders me a fit candidate when it comes to translating and summarizing documents. Hence, I've taken part in translating our team's "proof of concept" section on the wiki and condensing the "SPDA material submittion requirements". Additionally, I've also participated in narrating the promotional video in English.

Alice
I had actively participated in experiments in the lab for roughly 3 weeks during the summer. I was also engaged in human practice actvities such as Lantern, interviews with the sailing club, and National Medical Products Administration through organizing events and drafting documents. I was involved with the wiki page documents through writing the attributions introduction page and implementation. Additionally, I was one of the actors and script editors for the promotion video.

Marsha Lu
As a member of Links_China, I joined Human Practise group and wrote the interview of Doctor Zhang for general and PDF part. In addition, I wrote implementation for Links. I also exhibited the program of Links and spread the idea of synthetic biology in my school, Basis International School of Hangzhou. Then I wrote a description about the exhibition. I did some experiments in the lab for three weeks during summer vacation because of living in another province which is far away from Links and the lab.

Leon
As a member of Links China experimen group, I spend a great amount of time in experiments of producing maas. Also I have been a key member in the group of extracting maas from seaweeds as a standard variety. As a member of hp I've done a bit research on the application of cosmetic and written a survey interviewing the usage and acceptance of bio-sunscreen for our hp activities. As a common visitor of our lab, I conttribute to enlive the atmosphere of the lab building a working but not depressed lab.

Betty
To be a team member of Links, I came to Lab around four weeks and join lots of early part of experiments, I also was one of the photographers of our promotionvideo, wrote down our outline of PV and acted in our promotion video. Same as this, I worked down our high light video, and I am one main editor and one of the writer of our first article of subscribtion.

Joy
As the member of the team, I mainly take part in the experimental part and propagamdize part. For the experiment, I attribute to the early level of the experiment at lab. For the propagadize part, I am responsible for the wiki page, from the early design to the final. Also, I aid human practice group in the exhibitions and I involve in the promotion video in many aspects.

Jane
As a member of Links_China, I contributed to writing the Implementation page of the wiki. I translated the Experiment Notebook from 6.21 onwards, and the education section. I've also helped edit some documents. In total, I have participated in about two weeks of experiments in the labs.

William
As a member of the team, I spent a lot of time doing experiments in the lab, involved in the construction of DNA and the fermentation of MAA, providing data for mathematical modeling. In the other hand, I acted in the promotion video and I’m also one of the photographers.

Theresa
Participated in experiment of preLab, MAAs and sunlight healing, Wrote part of exhibition report and Organizer of LINKS CHINA exhibition in Basis International School Park Lane Harbor, One of the main contributers in modeling research and building, Involved in HP activities like trip to Lantern and in Promotion Video in terms of idea organizing and brainstorming

Anya
I participated in the experiment for two weeks, including sunburn repair and MMA extraction. I made an outline of the wiki before we started building it, and then I gave some suggestions on the design of the wiki. I joined the hardware production and was responsible for finding the right UV filter.

Windy
I participated for roughly two weeks in lab. I help to do some experiments such as extract plasimid, doing PCR, adding differ types of enzymes and compare the results in order to get the most suitable one. I joined the design of home page( I painted the wave). I also did some translate work of the text.

Anna
I participated in labortory experiments on MAAs for roughly 3 weeks.Took part in HP group and had an interview with Prof.Xiong on solar protection, wrote the interview result on wiki.

Cindy
I participated in the experimantal part for about one week during the starting stage of the experiment and about two weeks during summer holiday. I am also responsible for half of the translation of the sunburn repair experiment notebook.

Sophie
As a member of LINKS-China, I participate in the early expirement of pre-lab ,MAAs and sunlight healing about three weeks during and before summer vacation. Meanwhile, I organised the exhibition in Guangdong Country Graden School with a member of keystone, and handed in report afterwards.

Ella
I participated for roughly more than three weeks in wet lab experiments. Those experiments include the early yeast construction and part of the confirmatory experiments.

Daniel
As a member of the experiment team, I dedicated to one route for two weeks in midterm. During the period, I collaborated with some team members and wrote a few reports. Some chores in the experiment were done by me. I also one of the persons in charge of the translation of textual material for exhibition.

Frank
LINKS-CHINA is a place where everyone can exhibit people's best part of themselves and work together. As a member of the team, I am only able to help the team virtually and other clergy works because my inability to come back and cooperate with other members. I finished the customer's tendency analysis and market interest in the entrepreneur, and the revision of the lines in Promotion videos, so does added the captions in the video. It is unfortunate that I am not able to participate in lab work and other advertising project that is undergoing in the team, which is also my favorite part of the job. I hope I could contribute more next time.

Tim
As a member of Links_China, I mainly contributed to laboratory experiments throughout the summer for approximately two months, and participated in HP activities as well as writing specific parts in background information for our Wiki. Being one of the main experimental participants, I organized and designed the procedure for MAAs extraction based on Dr. Zhang Hang’s articles and papers related to this topic. The design allows our teammates to successfully extract MAAs from agar. Moreover, I participated in Sunburn Repair experiments, and carry out experiments with yeasts. Besides laboratory, I participated in HP activities including a trip to Lantern for learning market preferences of sunscreens and went to market areas like CocoPark to investigate the several brand’s biological components of sunscreens. I also contributed to our team’s Wiki background by discussing the issue of current market sunscreens on both texture and environment.

Pony
As a member of LINKS_China 2022, I'm responsible for editing our project's promotion video, and entreprenuership. At the start of the project, I did some reasearch for our human practice as well, but my major contribution were the editing part of our project's promotion video, and taking full charge of our team's entreprenuership.

Bruce
As a member of LINKS-China, I participate in the partial expirement of pre-lab. In addition, during the summer vacation, i participated for over 2 weeks of experiments and contributed in part to the extraction of the yeast genome from Sc.L2 to Sc.L3 at the same time help many of the teammates to Record and perfect experimental records.

Rosie
My main contributions are to Human Practices activities. As a member of the hardware groupe, I was responsibe for designing and producing UV light bead in response to the needs of our experiment. I designed prototypes, reached out to over 100 UV light bead manufacturers, and oversaw the development and production of the hardware. I also participated in seting up wiki page (my duties included basic original coding). Additionally, I helped translate our group's notebook.

Arendelle
As one of the member of LINKS _China ,I took part in the experiments for two weeks .During the two weeks ,I learnt to do experiments such as translating yeast and extracting MAAs.What's more, I enjoyed working and communicating with others.I hope I can do better and joined in more parts of iGEM next year.

Peter
I participated in sun burn reparation experiments for two weeks, such as preparing SSP cells, also recording parts of the experiment. I was responsible for communication between the Wiki team and other teams and also a small portion of coding.

Zimu Wang
I recently joined so I did not contibute a lot. The two thing I did were to translate one article and invite people to come to the presentation. This will change next year, and i will participate more next year.

Dylan
As a member of the experiment team, I participated in the experiment off and on from June to August. I contributed to the early and middle stages of the experiment, including yeast transformation and PCR experiments. I wrote lab notes and I sometimes do overtime experiments.

Sophia
In June, I urged the team members to have the weekly assembly in which team members report the progress of their own tasks, ensure that all team members are actively participating in our project. I participated in the iGEM South China Conference held in Shenzhen University. In addition, I participated in the early stage of the wet lab experiments for about one week as well as the later stage of the experiments for approximately two weeks. Moreover, I took part in some of the activities of integrated Human Practice such as visiting the Lantern, a cosmetics company, and interviewing the Sales Associate of some cosmetics store in the shopping mall The Mixc.

Lillian
As a team mate of experiement team I stayed in the lab for at least 5 days each week in summer holiday and particullary worked on the preparation of competent cell.

King
As one of the member of LINKS_China 2022. At the start i did some research to our human partice side of the ground however since i left shenzhen it is a petty i can't participate in the later experimental process of our team. However, i have joined the starting experiement about MAA extraction. And i did some presentation about our group project in Harrow school a part of human partice.

Yuehang She
I participated in the early biological experiments, and made contributions to the hardware and wiki parts of the engineering team (such as discussing the specific implementation scheme of the hardware and urging the team members to complete their task, and writing the original wiki code). I am also one of the earliest promoters of our iGEM team.

Mingo
I was the initial experiment leader of Links_China. I participated intermittently in experiments for roughly a month. For experiments, I helped design the protocols for MAAs product extraction. I also participated in Sunburn Repair experiment designs during its initial stages. For writing, I helped wrote and collect the record of our meeting with Dr. Zhang Hang, and also wrote and revised part of our wiki's Project Background and parts page.





Team Formation


The formation of our team was initiated by all of the team members joining a camp, organized by LINKS-Academy. The 5 days we spent together were a key period in the formation of our team. Although the academic lectures and experiments were significant portions of the camp, the group discussions that took place at night sparked the light amongst all the team members, where we were inspired in the process of project formation and group brainstorming. After extensive discussions, we finally ended up with more than 70 ideas, and we ultimately decided on one path-- researching sun protection-- and have worked tirelessly to achieve our results today.

LINKS members engaging in discussions during night sessions in camp

The academic lecture during the camp





Project Formation


This year LINKS_CHINA is a huge team of 47 people. We have encountered many difficulties and have accomplished our achievements only after challenging various difficulties. We were initially two teams, one doing yeast metabolic engineering trying to produce natural sunscreen substances and antioxidant substances, and the other attempting to manufacture enzymes for wound recovery and skin repair. However, we later realized that we could fully combine into a large and complete team, with the goal of making sunscreen ingredients that have both protection and skin repair properties.

Due to our advantage in large number of team members, we challenged ourselves with the complex project of Yeasts Metabolism engineering. The enormity of this project project is demonstrated through the metabolic pathway of yeasts we chose: we attempted to accomplish four types of MAA molecules production in our yeast and express enzymes of more than ten types in E.coli; even more, the coding sequence components that we tried to express exceeds more than thirty types.





Challenges We Faced


Project

A huge project comes with diverse problems. In the yeast metabolic engineering, due to benefitting from the detailed guidance from our instructors Boxiang Wang and Jun Yu, who possess ample experience in yeast genetic engineering, we successfully completed the knockout of TAL1 genes. Moreover, the integration of a set of gene (xyl123) was also a great success for us on the first trial. Unfortunately, when we start integrating the second set of genes, DDGs and OMT, we encountered a vast challenge, which took us a month of duration to break through. The month was one of the most difficult times in the lab, where members experienced countless times of failing. It was not only after attempting 6 insertion sites that we successfully integrated the genes. By experiencing this challenge, we eventually found the suitable insertion point and accumulated useful experiences, which aided us in the process of inserting other genes later successfully. As a result, we eventually obtained an outstanding yeast production yield.

Picture taken from the yeast PCR and selection experiment. We are often required to select hundreds of bacterial strains for PCR and selections in order to guarantee the DNA inserted correctly.

For the part of sunburn repair, we tried to express multiple enzymes, including CoQ10, GSH, GR, DNA photolyases in E.coli. Unexpectedly, most of our protein expressions encountered the inclusion bodies; even when we devoted countless hours in trying repeatedly, we did not conclude with the correct protein expression. Contrasting, the expression in hSOD and hcatalase has been straightforward; thus, we smoothly obtained the fusion protein to boost their functions.

Protein gel diagram from experiments in sunburn repair. We tried to express other proteins, but it ended up producing many inclusion bodies.

Management

The large team consists of 47 of us imposed a huge challenge: simple team emerging brought many issues in team managements. Many of our team members have to travel all the way across China to our lab, thus, not being able to participate fully into the lab experiments all the way through. As a result, we had to consistently coordinate online and offline cooperation. Furthermore, due to Shenzhen’s variating covid policies, our experiments were forced to be suspended twice. Fortunately, even under all these obstacles, we have a group of responsible members who are willing to lift these responsibilities on their shoulders, helping us to overcome the difficulties one by one, eventually demonstrating this extraordinary masterpiece. IGEM is never the endpoint for LINKS_China; on the contrary, it is the starting point for us. We will continue to put effort into this project even after the competition and optimizes our results to the best extent. We will continue demonstrating our passion for synthetic biology by carrying on.





Appreciations and Thanks


We appreciate everyone who put in all the effort and hard work into this project! We cannot make such significant achievements without all of your contributions!