Over the past six months, we have developed partnership with the team Thinker_Shenzhen. To facilitate access to the same lab, we have shared our mutual experience and resources extensively, including wet lab skills, dry lab tools, and human practice resources. thinker_Shenzhen has been working on a fungal cure for dermatological problems. They plan to develop biologically based medicines for patients with fungal-induced dermatoses. Take a look at the connection between Thinker_Shenzhen's project and ours, which can be used as a way to reduce costs while adding environmentally friendly assays to their project. There is a lot of overlap in the progress of our project. Therefore, we decided to collaborate with them and share our project ideas. We believe it would be beneficial for both of us, and this has proven to be the case in practice.
During the experiment, our team shared the same lab with Thinker-Shenzhen, in which we shared the use of centrifuges and other experimental instruments that were common in our respective experiments. Also, because of the similarity of some of our experiments, we had the same instructor to guide our experiments.
During the experiments, we shared knowledge about experimental safety and shared materials, asking questions and solving problems in areas where each other was inadequate. In the process, we fell in love with biological science together and enjoyed the process of completing the experiments, so our friendship grew deeper and deeper, and we became more confident in bringing synthetic biology to the public.
- Friendly Cooperation
- Idea Sharing
- Progressing together
Project
Since E.coli 1917 is non-toxic and harmless, Thinker-Shenzhen originally intended to apply E.coli 1917 containing chitinase directly to human skin for the treatment of fungal suppression, but although the E.coli they used and the other chemicals contained in the product were guaranteed to be harmless, it was difficult to release the intracellular chitinase directly to humans and the other unrelated genes of E.coli 1917 in the released material. They chose to produce a large amount of E. coli 1917 in their factory and purify it into a high purity enzyme product for use in humans to avoid the risk of gene leakage and to prevent some of the E. coli 1917 expression from failing, resulting in poor bacterial inhibition. In our communication with Thinker-Shenzhen, we found that since it does not work in humans, they can use E.coli BL21, which produces endotoxin but has a higher expression capacity, to express chitinase in the plant, which can greatly improve the yield. But even if the yield is increased, in order to release a large amount of intracellular chitinase, considering that our project includes a lysis component - containing the arabinose manipulator and SRRz splitting gene, we assisted us in designing a lysis system and adding the lysis module, their team can prevent the live strain from After unremitting efforts, the Thinker-Shenzhen project incorporated a lysis system to disrupt the BL21 cell wall to release the chitinase, and finally went through a purification process to remove endotoxin and other impurities to obtain a high purity chitinase product.
Meeting
In order to improve the work of both teams in sustainability and to deepen the understanding of sustainability, we organized an online sustainability exchange meeting with Thinker_Shenzhen. During the meeting, we clarified the basic definition of sustainable development and the concepts of science and technology, economy, ecology and industry, providing a deeper and more comprehensive understanding of the Sustainable Development Goals. The conference was an opportunity to implement the SDG's Collaborative Development Goal, and on the other hand, it gave us a new direction to think about our subsequent work on sustainable development, and we are starting to improve our projects in the 7th and 9th goals. In addition to the inspiration we received from Thinker_Shenzhen, we were able to share our thoughts on how we deeply consider the development goals of our project in terms of drug side effects, production costs, and environmental pollution. After this meeting, our communication with Thinker_Shenzhen also became more mundane, with each giving advice on each other's shortcomings.
In Shenzhen, two of our teams, SMS, SCIE, and BASIS, from different high schools joined together to initiate an inter-school activity on synthetic biology. Our two teams worked together to create a PowerPoint, a peripheral, and a promotional video and encountered some internal and external obstacles in the process, but we met together to discuss and come up with solutions. The lecture on synthetic biology explored various aspects of the origin, development, basic logic, current situation, and future prospects of this emerging discipline.
Thanks to Thinker-China's help in creating the promotional video for our SCIE lecture, we were able to get an excellent promotional video.
-Thinker-Shenzhen
During the submission of the iGEM video, Thinker_Shenzhen encountered the problem of not being able to upload the subtitles of the typed axes, and the two team captains contacted the students who made and uploaded the video. Since we had already finished all the work of video production and uploading before them, we taught Thinker_Shenzhen to improve their subtitle format through online communication, and finally successfully finished uploading before DDL.
Since Thinker_Shenzhen did not have any experienced students in video editing among the team members who participated in the online education activities we co-organized, they were responsible for the video material collection and copywriting together with some of our team members at this stage, while we were fully responsible for the video script writing, spooling, editing and post-processing in return. In return, we were responsible for the scripting, editing, post-processing, and so on. This video collaboration undoubtedly deepened the partnership between our two teams, and also improved our cooperation in the joint task.
Hardware
During our project meeting with Thinker_Shenzhen, we learned that they were testing for fungus on the skin and needed patients to go to the hospital in person, and in the process they needed to test for fungus. Because our test method only requires a simple adjustment of the promoter to detect a variety of other substances. We discovered through our communication that the fungus has a specific promoter, so we provided them with our test kit to detect the specific substance of the fungus to help them move forward with the project.