Collaboration
ATCG with Rapa-OT (ECNUAS)
On July 11th, we and the team Rapa-OT (ECNUAS) from Shanghai Arete Bilingual School hosted an online collaboration meeting to share our two teams’ projects and exchange advice and ideas.
Through the meeting, the team members from Rapa-OT offered us valuable information ranging from how to design a questionnaire to put on an influential charity sale.
Figure 1. Screenshot of our online meetup with Rapa-OT (ECNUAS)
Based on their clear and organized sharing of experiences, we first learned the procedure of designing a helpful survey and then we explained what the potential data pool can offer us in future activities.
To design a survey based on the topic of our project:
1. First, we need to set several goals for the survey, such as what we want to know from the public, what aspects the public may want to know or learn from us, how we can put on the survey public, and so on.
2. Then, it’d be necessary for us to detail our broad goals into well-refined questions or ideas.
3. In addition, after we publish a soft copy of our survey with the questions we want to ask, we could spread the survey to the public with the help of the internet and let it reach all kinds of people of different conditions and ages. Online social media accounts of our team and friends’ forwarding could all be the mediums to put on our surveys.
After we establish a data pool based on the survey, we could:
1. Easily notice the public understandings of which aspects of their awareness about our topic or our project are inadequate, in return we may need to take more efforts to enhance the related information in the public minds during our further education activities.
2. In order to enhance the group consciousness on a social issue, we could implement online lectures to share our knowledge with a broader range of audiences, or we could also write articles to promote relevant information.
Furthermore, team Rapa-OT also provided us with some good advice on interviewing. They suggested we consult some experts and it will be much helpful, especially in having a deeper insight about the project and implementing the experimental results into practical everyday uses.
To interview experts:
1. We need to prepare the interview questions based on experts’ backgrounds and our project. In addition, we could do better to prepare additional questions based on each assumed answer which could make the interview more effective and we could obtain more information.
2. Regards to specific question ideas, we could consult them onhow to put our experiment outputs into products even to the broader public and we could listen to the experts’ opinions on our project. Since our project aims to apply our optimized Casposons technology to disease therapy, so we could list some questions, like “Will the government supports our products?” “Does our product have security assurance?” “Does our project have a high-cost performance ratio?”, et al.
At last, teammates from Rapa-OT provided us with an idea of how to carry out charity sales. We could organize charity sales both online and offline: we could run our WeChat online store so that people could easily shop online; we could also set up a sale spot in crowded places with high visitor flow rates.
ATCG with Sugar Fox (Jiangsu_United)
On July 14th, we had an online collaboration meeting with the Sugar Fox team (Jiangsu_United) from Shanghai, where we presented our projects to each other and exchanged our opinions. From their presentation, we learned that the Sugar Fox team focuses on screening several compounds as potential drugs for type 2 diabetes that inhibit FoxO1 transcriptional activation activity. Before this meetup, they prepared several questions and topics where we discussed with each other
Figure 2. Screenshot of our online meetup with Sugar Fox (Jiangsu_United)
After we introduced our project, they seemed to be very interested. For example, they brought out the ethical issues that might be involved in our gene editing technology application, they wanted to know how we will solve them or avoid them. We also had the same concern but we thought it will be better to consult relevant experts for their opinions, without risking pushing the ethical limits of human beings.
We had a sharing session on planning fundraising. Based on our experience, we advised they could cater to the audience through the popular short video platform of the day, like Tik Tok, and they could customize peripheral goods for sale.
Regarding the social survey, our team designed the questionnaire in both Chinese and English and received more than 300 completed questionnaires, which we thought was still far from enough. The Sugar Fox team suggested us investigate other related survey reports and take them into the account when we do the data analysis, they also showed us the quoted reports they adopted in their survey analysis. We appreciated their advice, but we had concerns about the data reliability since the report was collected 2 years before. They mentioned that this report still could be used for reference since the data in China might not change much due to the epidemic in recent years.

In order to have more inspiration for implementing our product, we also asked Sugar Fox about their product prospects. Sugar Fox's goal is to successfully establish a screening platform to find more compounds for developing potential drugs and they could also continue the drug development if they could find one that can effectively treat diabetes and show investors hope in BP. We were inspired by their plan, and we also suggested that they could further apply for patents. After this collaboration meeting, we also built a great friendship with each other and there is a chance of building a deeper partnership between us in the future.