On July 21^st, our Feed Family team and the Buta Factory team (East_China) made a online appointment to have a virtual meetup in the morning to communicate about the research and publicity together.

According to their sharing, we learned about their experimental process, principles and the use of lactic acid bacteria to reduce costs, and effective methods to solve difficult problems in the experiment, such as: solving the problem of poor water solubility of n-butanol and reducing the environmental pollution. In return, we also explained to them how our project design works and they asked a series of questions about the "enzymes" and the "synthetic proteins" that we used.
Especially, In the pleasant communication with Buta Factory, we learned some different ways of publicity, such as gathering people to give a speech. Regards to the periphery products, they recommended to we print the team logo on them, so that it looks nice and can also achieve the effect of publicity.In terms of publicity, they intended to launch a charity sale in local schools. We mentioned we had concerns about organizing the fundraising campaign. Their member said that they will choose a place with a lot of traffic such as the entrance of the cafeteria. And it not only can sell peripheral goods but also publicize its social media account, even inviting passers to fill in the questionnaire. On this topic, we proposed the idea of running an online store for selling peripheral goods to make the purchase more convenient. Their team member also said they would use the money from the charity sale to help the school's charitable organization. Since we both created WeChat Official Accounts for communication and education use, we had a discussion on planning the post contents and we both agreed that besides team daily work updates, we shall write some articles to popularize science.
At the late stage of our meetup, we also talked a little about the business plan drafting. In the pricing of the business plan, they shared their pricing strategy, and later we borrowed this strategy when drafting our business plan.
In the end, they said that they planned to conduct an online educational activity, but they have difficulties figuring out how to communicate that scientific or even technical knowledge with most of the public who lack related learning experience. We suggested to them that they can combine hard-to-understand knowledge points with real-life examples to create some associations for helping them understand that knowledge.
Above all, both of us learned a lot from this meetup.

The TeMoZerapy team (SubCat_Shanghai), just like us, they are a high school student iGEM team gathered in Shanghai from different cities. Diversified sources make them a dynamic and youthful team. We hosted an after-tea party with them offline and during the meetup, we have exchanged and discussed some topics, and through insights from different perspectives, we have also had different thinking about many jobs.

Our meetup mainly focused on blow three topics: team name’s inspiration, team fundraising, and team promotion video.

According to their captain's introduction, their research topic is the study of tumor drug resistance. Glial tumors are the most common malignant tumors in the central nervous system of the human body. The majority of patients will eventually fail the treatment of glial tumors because of resistance to TMZ (Temozolomide). And their purpose is to reduce the resistance of TMZ. The team's name uses TeMo as a prefix, and changes from therapy to "Zerapy", and the fusion of the two shows their determination to solve the TMZ resistance problem.
Our main theme is to study the activities of different enzymes and adopt the strategy of multi-enzyme synergistic degradation to deal with animal feed indigestion issues. Our name is also based on the theme of our research, Feed Family not only means that everyone in our team will support each other just like a family but also means that we and animals are a big family, which is consistent with our team slogan: "Better Feed Better Meat".

Regarding fundraising, we exchanged sales channels and strategies with each other. We showed them our peripheral goods, including umbrellas, fans, backpacks, etc. And we introduced them our WeChat mini store that we used for launching our goods for selling. We also pointed out that we could even conduct a pre-sale if our customized goods are not ready yet. Besides, the pricing is lower than average so our peripheral goods are quite competitive and popular. Therefore, we called it small profits but quick turnover.
The TeMoZerapy team also brought their peripheral goods samples, including pillows, umbrellas, laser bags, etc. They focused on the shooting for the promotion of the good and provided us with some tips. Different from our sale channel, they decided to go to some shopping malls and directly promote their peripheral goods to passers and they can communicate with their consumers with their project and the concerning topics, glioma, and TMZ drug resistance issue.

Since both of our teams were in the stage of shooting team promotion videos, we shared with each other about shooting ideas and video styles.
Our promotion video will show how our team works every day and will specially prepare a part, explaining the experimental principle. This kind of framework can help the audience understand the project and grasp the theme and progress of our team more quickly.
Compared to our realist style, the TeMoZerapy team's promotion video is more artistic and anthropomorphic. The main character is a singer in cheongsam who stands for those cells in patients with glioma and the audience stands for TMZ who cured the singer like usual. Then the thing changed since a black scare appeared on the hand of the singer which stands for the PDRG1 gene and those audiences (TMZ) start to judge the singer, meaning the drug resistance starts. At the end of the story, other actors show up and change clothes for the singer to bring her a brand new style then the audiences come back, indicating the solution the TeMoZerapy team provided could deal with the TMZ drug resistance issue.
They used artistic techniques to allow the audience to better understand the difficult situation of patients with glioblastoma. Whether it is the TeMoZerapy team or our Feed Family, we interpret our projects from different angles to convey our beliefs to the public. This diverse thinking and communication have brought us a lot of gains.