Our collaboration was held with three 2022 iGEM teams:
On July 12th, we conducted a collaboration with the iGEM-2022 team of Fudan University through our seniors' introduction.
Figure 1. Virtual meetup with the Fudan team member
We all take the cell factory in synthetic biology as the main pathway, so the design of our projects are quite similar. They mainly focus on converting carotene into vitamin A, while we synthesize medium-chain fatty acids through the reverse fatty acid β-oxidation pathway. According to their introduction, vitamin A can play an anti-aging and antioxidant role in cosmetic industry. But since the body cannot make vitamin A itself, the main source of pro-vitamin A, such as beta-carotene, is external intake. Different from them, chain fatty acids in our products are not as well-known as vitamin A, so they gave us a lot of suggestions on IHP (Integrated Human Practice). They reminded us that the research object should be divided into upstream, midstream, and downstream to analyze and carry out IHP. And we have also reached a consensus to hold a social educational lecture together on the evening of August 10th to carry out our social responsibility.
Figure 2. The Fudan team provided some suggestions on conducting IHP and Education
events
Moreover, we also prepare an educational lecture for the public together. During the process, we exchanged our idea about synthetic biology and made slides. We introduced synthetic biology from the origin, the development process to the latest papers and prospects. The Fudan team introduced synthetic biology in the eyes of college students, they took a historical perspective. Both teams were very glad that we can contribute a little bit of our own power to biology so that people who are not majoring in biology can still learn about the present and future of synthetic biology. Through all these, we also have a deeper understanding of Fudan’s project and the theory.
Figure 3. Poster (left) and the screenshot (right) of the lecture by cooperation with Fudan
On July 23rd, we started a collaboration meetup with NJXDF-CHN, a Nanjing team, via Tencent Conference. We mainly communicated with each other about the publicity, education, charity sale, peripheral goods, and the promotion video making, etc. In this process, we not only increased our understanding of each other's projects, provided each other with suggestions on several events managing, but also established a good friendship.
Figure 4. Online meetup with the NJXDF-CHN team
The NJXDF-CHN team shared their IHP experience. They made wristbands (to be given to children during public welfare activities), origami flowers, masks with their team's logo, and emojis. We propose that they can launch the memes on WeChat, which not only has the function of tipping, can raise funds, but also can play a good role in promotion and publicity. Different from us, their 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 their peripheral products mentioned above to children as a gift. The location they decided to carry out the education activity is generally schools, communities and science museums.
In return, we also shared our plans and experiences in education and publicity. Firstly, our offline education will mainly take place in our school (PINGHE) after the new term begins. Our 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 our 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 our offline publicity, we 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. We have created a WeChat Official Account where we can post popular science articles and publicize the daily progress of our work. We have also created a Bili Bili account to post popular science videos.
Finally, we also discussed the promotion video making. The NJXDF-CHN team recommended animation software which they used for the video making and we exchanged ideas about this.They provided some good suggestions for our scripts.
On August 9th, 2022, we had a collaboration discussion with the Canton_HS (Guardians of the Stars) team in the laboratory. Canton_HS is a team dedicated to the detection and treatment of autism. Based on the studies on the correlation between glutamate, tryptophan, copper and autism in academic journals and the therapeutic effect of SLC7A5 gene expression protein on autism, the relevant plasmids were constructed for further experimental exploration.
Figure 5. We were presenting our engineering design to the Canton_HS team
Both of us introduced the main application fields of our project, the expected results, and the general experimental process, and discussed the problems we encountered in the experiment and the solutions. What is interesting and worth learning is that they encountered a lot of interesting problems in the experiment (such as decreased ampicin resistance, and strange results of the glue), the reason is not clear, so they used the exclusion method to eliminate each element of the experimental process one by one, and finally determined that the most likely problem was the colony. This process of screening for errors is something to learn from and something that is missing from our team. Besides the preliminary basic operation, our process is very smooth, and the results that we didn't make the first time are repeated, so we don't do a lot of error analysis.
Through this long but treasure communication, both sides not only gained dialectical views on theoretical values and empirical values, further standardization of experimental operations and further understanding of theoretical knowledge, but also saw each other's persistence in experiments after numerous attempts to start over, and gained positive attitudes in the face of future scientific research failures. Experiment failure is inevitable due to error and given probability, but we should still be enthusiastic through rational analysis, trial and error. Finally, we followed each other's WeChat Official Accounts as support to each other.
Figure 6. We had a wonderful discussion time
