Collaborations

Our collaboration with team SJTU-BioX-Shanghai runs through the entire project. We met and had extensive and friendly exchanges with SJTU-BioX-Shanghai at the Conference of China iGEMer Community (CCiC) conference. Our project is exploring multi-site editing based on DNA storage, and the project of SJTU-BioX-Shanghai is exploring DNA-stored data protection under radiation conditions. Since the project of two teams both involve expansion in DNA storage, we established more closer contact. Our collaboration mainly revolves around the two core aspects of our projects-experiments and human practice.

I. Online Meeting

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In order to better cooperate and understand the details of each other's projects, we arranged for an online meeting. At the meeting, we detailed the projects of the respective teams at first, and then, based on DNA storage,we shared our opinions on DNA storage from its fundamental algorithm and future development to application scenarios and possible limitations. Through this communication, we realized that we could cooperate on experiments to verify that each other's experimental results were correct. In addition, we conducted a wide range of communications on how to host HP events, as a result, we have established friendly cooperation on HP, and we plan to publish a DNA storage handbook together. What's more, Our team has certain experience in modeling and encoding, so we gave them new ideas on how to relate modeling to experimentation. We found that the HP activities of the SJTU-BioX-Shanghai team were very abundant and various, so we learned relevant experiences from them, and they also gave us suggestions on it and team building.

II. Mentor and Be Mentored

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When it comes to what we learn from this collaboration, we identified the following important gains from this fruitful collaboration:

I: We have learned a lot of skills in carrying out HP activities and we have completed a lot of HP activities together. In these activities, we not only let more people learn about DNA storage from the history of DNA storage to the applications of DNA storage, we also get inspiration from people who have no contact with our project, and our project benefited a lot.

II: The collaboration with SJTU-BioX-Shanghai made us realize the importance of collaboration and communication with teams from different perspectives. The process of communicating with them has broadened our thinking and improved our relationship with different backgrounds and different personalities. The skills of people working together.

On July 16th, 2022, we had a one-day communication with TJUSLS_China team's face to face and exchange programs seeking opportunities for collaboration.(click here to visit their wiki)

I. Offline Meeting

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First of all, each team introduced their project, our project was explained by the captain, and we had in-depth exchanges in experiment, HP, modeling, art, wiki and other aspects.



In terms of experiments,we exchanged mutual experiment protocols and the experimental conditions of both teams. We mainly talked about the method of building the plasmids, they used the T4 ligase while we used the seamless cloning, These two methods have their own advantages and disadvantages, and our two teams intend to use both methods to carry out our experiments. In terms of art, we showed the uniforms and the badge while they showed their pixel style; In terms of wiki,our team is not good at web pages and encountered many problems when submitting wiki. Some members of TJUSLS_China are very good at the front-end development of web pages. For this reason, we had extensive and in-depth exchanges with them, and they gave us some wonderful ideas; In terms of modeling, both teams did well in modeling and we shared our experience on how to code and how to build molecular prediction models. In terms of HP, we found that the HP activities of the TJUSLS_China team were very abundant and various, so we learned relevant experiences from them. They shared with us their experience of organizing HP events and they also invented us to carry out HP activities together.

II. Mentor and Be Mentored

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After this meetup, we gained a lot.They provided us with suggestions on how to find wiki partners and help us in our future wiki work. Our cooperation with TJUSLS_China has been further deepened, which not only promoted the development of the project, but also gained a lot of friendship. In this collaboration, our two teams learn from each other's advantages in different fields and strive to develop more comprehensive projects.

I. Online Meeting

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July, 2022, we participated in an online meetup cohosted by Guangxi University, Jiangnan University, Northwestern Polytechnical University and Jilin University (GXU-China, Jiangnan_China, NPU_China, JLU-China). The meetup aimed at a preliminary communication and follow-up collaborations among different teams at the beginning of the summer vacation. During the meetup, we succinctly introduced our project, and focused the introduction on material selection, component design, experimental design, and characterization methods, which were designed to verify the results of our project. We also shared the visualization of multi-site editing in the dry lab.

II. Mentor and Be Mentored

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After the introduction, students that came from other projects concerning Cas9 protein or simply grew interest in our project exchanged thoughts with us on various subjects including fundamentals and application, biological safety, etc. The discussion deepened their recognition towards DNA storage, meanwhile pave the way for future communication. It is also worth to mention that we learned a lot about how to better conduct human practice.

I. Online Meeting

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After the presentation of the Conference of China iGEMer Community (CCiC) conference, the students of the modeling group of Ocean University of China were very interested in our project principle and hoped to cooperate in modeling, so we conducted an online meeting to get to know each other in detail. Through this meeting, the students of Ocean University of China had a deeper understanding of our dry experiment theory and provided us with ideas for modeling. They also got inspirations from our project on how to build a meaningful model.(click here to visit their wiki)

II. Mentor and Be Mentored

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The team of Ocean University of China provided us with ideas for modeling. They also got inspirations from our project on how to do dry lab and we helped them to solve some problems of dry lab.Communication with the team from Ocean University of China not only broaden our thinking, but also made up for our shortcomings and made our project more mature.