Collaborations

    During the iGEM competition, we jointly organized 4 sessions. In these sessions, we enhanced communication and collaborated with other iGEM teams in different regions, by setting different conference topics, such as educational, human practice, experimental, and so on. Specifically, thanks to all teams that have helped us along the way. It is because of these teamwork that we can sow, germinate, thrive, blossom and give off fragrance like our flowers.

    @NNU-China

    On January 2022，Our first attempt to contact the cooperation team, we were lucky to have an in-depth communication with Nanjing Normal University NNU-China team and reached a consensus on long-term cooperation and mutual assistance. During this communication, we had a lot of exchanges on assigning team tasks, organizing wet and dry teams, communicating team operations, and grasping the important and difficult points of the project. Through the communication with them, even though we were the first-time team to participate in iGEM, we deepened our understanding of the competition rules and enhanced our confidence in the future progress of the project.

    Fig.1 The first offline communication with NNU-China

    @ Jiangnan-China, @NPU-China, @Jilin_China, @Guangxi-U-China

    In 17th July 2022, we participated in the IGEM online communication meeting co-sponsored by Jiangnan-China, NPU-China, Jilin_China, and Guangxi-U-China. We also invited students from High School Affiliated to Nanjing Normal University to listen to the meeting offline, which will enhance the impact of our work and give us a better understanding of what our projects can bring to the community.

    Fig.2 Conference Brochure, Agenda and Abstract of NJXDF-CHN team

    In this meeting, each team made a detailed presentation about their project. We also presented our project design and the progress of our project. We received a lot of professional comments and questions, and all of these exchanges gave us a clearer direction for the improvement of the project. After the meeting, other team members, including NJU, NAU-China, NJTech-China, enthusiastically and actively provided us with their social media account and other resources. With so many excellent teams to competition and cooperation side by side, we are full of hope and confidence in the future.

    Fig.3 We are introducing our team project

    Fig.4 Photo of the offline participant teams

    @PINGHE

    On July 23rd, we started a collaboration meetup with a highschool team PINGHE via Tencent Conference. We communicated with each other about the HP activities, education, charity sale, peripheral goods, and the promotion video, etc. We increased our understanding of each other's projects, provided each other with suggestions on several events managing, and established a good friendship with each other.

    Fig.5 Online meetup with the NJXDF-CHN team

    Team PINGHE shared their plans and experiences in education and publicity. Firstly, their offline education will mainly take place in their school (PINGHE) after the new term begins. Their school has a lot of student propaganda projects, such as one-to-one cooperation between high school and junior high school, library propaganda, auditorium propaganda, etc., which makes it convenient for team members to gather and conduct our education activities. Some of their team members have contacted the primary schools they used to attend, so they will go to carry out the educational activities there. Secondly, in addition to the offline publicity, they also have charity sales in Shanghai and run a WeChat online store which could also attract the attention of the public. Thirdly, the online education equally matters. They have created a WeChat Official Account where they can post popular science articles and publicize the daily progress of our work. They have also created a Bili Bili account to post popular science videos.

    We also shared our design of iHP experience. We have made wristbands (to be given to children during public welfare activities), origami flowers, masks with our logo, and emojis. PINGHE propose that we can launch the memes on WeChat, which not only has the function of tipping to raise funds, but also can play a good role in promotion and publicity. Different from PINGHE, our main way of propaganda at present is to publicize to young teenagers, distribute knowledge in picture books in a simple and understandable way, and give our peripheral products mentioned above to children as a gift. The location we decided to carry out the education activity is generally schools, communities and science museums.

    Finally, we also discussed the promotion video making. We exchanged views and suggestions on video production software and script design.

    @ NJTech-China

    On August 5, 2022, we participated in a meet up in Nanjing New Eco-Life Science Park, hosted by NNU-China and NJTech-China teams. This meet up was conducted for the Education section of the team communication. In the Education section, Song Yanjin, the Vice Captain of our team reported that the NJXDF-CHN team had conducted nearly ten activities for children, middle school students, and the general public, including the production of picture books and brochures, and community outreach. The other teams also showed their best performance and provided new ideas.

    Fig.6 Poster of meet up

    Fig.7 Excerpts from our picture books

    Fig.8 Photo taken at the meeting

    In addition, the meeting invited Mr. Shen from Nanjing Normal University to share online. Mr. Shen analyzed and explained what to do in the next social practice, and how to collect of effective content. All the team said they benefited from listening to it. Mr. Shen also suggested that we could look for some fragrance experts or companies engaged in fragrance production to communicate, and we decided to adopt Mr. Shen's suggestion and incorporate the proposal into our follow-up plan.

    Fig.9 Photo taken at the end of the meet up

    @ ZJU-CHINA

    On August 7, 2022, we participated in an online meetup hosted by WORLDSHAPER-HZ, ZJU-CHINA, and ZJUT-CHINA teams. iGEMers from each team exchanged and learned by sharing the progress of projects as well as their experience in activities to make progress together. The NJXDF-CHN team, represented by Yuxuan Li, gave a general introduction to the team project. She also shared online the picture books produced by our team so that other teams could understand our content easier.

    Fig.10 Brochure of the online meet up and the team intro of NJXDF-CHN

    In the communication session after the report of each team, Captain Aili Sang had an in-depth communication with Professor Aiping Pang of Zhejiang University of Technology. They discussed the feasibility of commercial production of aromatic compound 2-PE by engineered bacteria. Sang sought optimization and improvement advice from Prof. Pang. Finally, Prof. Pang showed great interest in this project and affirmed the team's efforts in the preliminary research and experimental work.

    Fig.11 Photo of online meetup

    Fig.12 Online presentation of NJXDF-CHN team

    After several online and offline meetings, we achieved communication and cooperation with other teams. The orderly and smooth running of our project was directly related to these collaborations. Specifically, we gained experience, knowledge and precious friendships in the iGEM competition. As the theme of our project suggests, the flowers watered with enthusiasm by our peers will bloom and the fragrance from synthetic biology will be brought to more people in the world.