Nowadays, there are a large number of patients with type 2 diabetes in the world, and the discovery of new anti-type 2 diabetes drugs is imminent. De-Dia is a 2022 iGEM public welfare research team, dedicated to studying the medical treatment of type 2 diabetes in China and globally. Glucokinase, GK is distributed in the pancreas, liver, brain, and intestine and plays a role in regulating blood glucose balance. With the help of the newly discovered De-Dia active compound to activate GK, it can promote insulin secretion to lower the blood sugar, so that patients will be free from the pain of diabetes without side effects.

On Aug 4th, we hosted an online meeting with De-Dia, which lasted almost half an hour. Both teams introduced the topic and team progress, and a considerable proportion of the discussion focused on fundraising and education. We explained how our fundraising works, for example, the products for our fundraising, how to make our products unique, and ways to attract more customers to buy our products. In this regard, we recommended they sell flowers or other goods on the night of Chinese Valentine's day (QiXI Festival) which was also what we planned. They agreed that it was a good idea.

Guarded, can be as endless as the Milky Way, can also be small as a star. Guardians of the star aim to find a way to diagnose and treat children with autism. Autism is not well known in academia, but its incidence increases linearly in children, and once it develops, cure rates are significantly lower. By using BL21(DE3) as a receptor cell, it expresses the corresponding protein of the constructed plasmid. Based on this, Guardians of the stars (Canton_HS) is trying to launch autism detection kits and probiotic drinks that can be used for treatment.

We hosted an online conference, and it lasted over half an hour. During the discussion, we exchanged valuable experiences. We each introduced our team and demonstrated our recent progress. They put forward a question about the collaboration between the wet lab and dry lab as they will sometimes have misunderstanding thoughts so we offered our suggestions to let their leaders be the ones to engage in communicating in order to make sure the information passed on is accurate. They have also raised a question about the expert interviews as dry labs had trouble preparing questions thus they had a lot of pressure. We suggested they could prepare the outline first and then list some open questions.

On the 7th Aug, We had a global meet-up with 20 teams on zoom founded by Worldshaper-HZ, ZJU-China, and ZJUT-China. There are 7 tracks in total, whose research topics are foundational advance, food, and nutrition, diagnostics, therapeutic, biomanufacturing, and environment. This whole meeting starts from 8:30 am to 5:00 pm.

Our team focused on the basic principles of our project and specially introduced an APP application we designed and promoted. Although this took us a lot of energy, it has undoubtedly become an important part of our normalized education and communication platform. Many team members came to consult us on the design and operation of this app after the meeting, and they were surprised and affirmed by our work. We encourage everyone to pay attention to physical health with us and jointly contribute to a better life for mankind with synthetic biology technology.

In general, it was a great pleasure to have this chance to collaborate with so many teams across the world and we had a meaningful time together. We sincerely hope that each team will achieve its best results and hope to collaborate again with them in the future.