Collaboration is an important part of driving project research and helping us find support among teams. As we all know, cooperation and collaboration are necessary skills of modern people. Different understandings of the same problem help different teams collide with each other to create new sparks.
On August 19th, we had a offline meetup with another 2022 iGEM team MaiaPotion (Zhejiang_United). During the conference, we had a chance to exchange our ideas with the other group as well as learn about the other team’s project, including their aims, research background and what they have done so far. We also prepared some questions and shared problems that our team faced, such as how to write a formal business plan for our own project and how to build an outstanding wiki. Ultimately, it helped in generating new ideas for our topic and pushing our team to keep moving forward.
Maiapotion is an international group of high school students from different cities. Its main purpose is to use 2 '-FL, which was synthesized by Saccharomyces Cerevisiae, as a cell factory instead of Escherichia coli and added to infant milk powder to make it more close to human milk. This research can help infants tremendously who cannot be breastfed. Additionally, the use of sweet potato residue also improves the efficiency of resource conversion and promotes sustainable development. After we presented our project to each other, we were delighted to realize that both teams were equally concerned with the physical health and development of infants and young children and actually we are targeting on the same group of consumers. This made our conversation pay special attention to the special constitution of infants and young children during this meetup and the efforts for arousing parents' attention to the development and health of infants and young children in our education campaigns.
Each team presented the project and discussed with each other on various topics.
Faced with the problem of division of labor and collaboration in the early stage of the project, they took the initiative to provide us with some suggestions and we had a discussion on these topics. Our confusion focused on the writing of the business plan, the cooperation between the wet lab and dry lab, and how to communicate with online members who were quarantine at home due to COVID-19 epidemic. Regarding the business plan, they suggested that we could seek help from experts to better target the product's target customer base with their professional insights. On this basis, the team determined the basic structure of business plan through team discussions, then divided the business plan into several parts, and assigned tasks to each member. For the cooperation within the team, the other party suggested that we should prioritize the urgent tasks which have been allocated to the wet lab and dry lab in advance, then they could seize chance to communicate with each other and update the progress. Similarly, we also introduced our experience of making educational videos and Vlogs of daily life which we also strongly recommended them to make the use of media for spreading the impact, and invited them to follow the updates of our popular science articles and popular science videos.
The development of the Internet has made distance no longer an important factor hindering communication. On August 21st, we had an online exchange meeting with the members of E.H-Cheers (SuZhou_Union). E.H-Cheers is studying to improve the quality of Luzhou-flavor liquor through a high-yielding yeast strain that could produce ethyl caproate to improve the flavour and taste.
The leader of EH-cheers first basically introduced their team, and talked about the current situation and future development direction of the liquor industry. They told us about the difficulties they faced in the research, such as how to break the public's stereotype of Chinese baijiu and attract young adult consumers. We also made some suggestions to them, such as trying to dig out the reason behind the cultural labels of baijiu and adding some popular elements to make it easier for young people to accept and so on. Afterwards, we also introduced to them the basic situation of our project, we are working on an oral vaccine for hand, foot and mouth disease and viral gastroenteritis in infants and young children. The final products of the two teams will enter the human body orally, so we also consulted them about the national standards of the food industry and the ideas for writing business plans. The members of EH-cheers answered these questions patiently and we were inspired a lot. Finally, they also introduced us their team's mascot, and they also suggested that we could design some cute cartoon logos to shorten the distance with the children and promote their team and the core topic of their project. After talking with them, we had more thoughts on our education campaigns.
We had a virtual meetup with the 2022 iGEM team E.H-Cheers (SuZhou_Union)
