Over the past year, USTC-Software team has maintained a close contact with USTC team. We have generated a deep relationship over this year. Due to our location and relevant topic of project, we have been able to have good online and offline interaction, which makes our communication much more convenient and our software better.

Our team and USTC have always maintained a harmonious and cooperative relationship since before, and the two teams have communicated frequently on-line and off-line. Moreover, USTC and USTC-Software have also set up the Association of Coding Life in our school, dedicated to passing on iGem and synthetic biology to a wider audience.

Fig 1 University of Science and Technology Life Coding Association

Since the beginning of our project in March, two parties have been in close communication online and offline. We jointly carried out a biology training for the wet team members and the biology group members of our team. From these training sessions, members from both teams learned some knowledge related to life science, which provided a solid theoretical foundation for our team's future research and platform building

Fig 2 Joint Biological Training

From April to May, we started to look into the literature and explore the topic of our project. But because most of members of our team aren’t major in biology, we often encounter some difficulty on biology. The wet team helped us a lot. They provided us with professional knowledge to shrink our research direction to a small scale. Our initial idea was to develop a platform to analyze and predict protein interactions by using transcriptomes mechanism. And discussions between us helped us to further clarify the feasibility and significance of the idea and understand the needs of selecting proper molecule structure in laboratory. After the discussion, we made appropriate adjustments to our direction.

Fig.3 Joint meeting between USTC and USTC Software

We also listened carefully to the USTC team's ideas. Because most of us are familiar with mathematical and computer models, we quickly found some flaws in their existing models and proposed better models to replace them. They all admitted that the problem did exist and decided to take our advice.

Fig.4 USTC Presentation

In late May, we participated together in the science and technology week held by our school. We set up a booth on campus so that students could do some simple experiments by themselves here. The participants were mostly middle and high school students from nearby schools, as well as elementary students. They showed great interest in biological knowledge, and some even asked us questions about it. Naturally, an idea occurred to our mind that we may be able to do something to promote the relevant knowledge to the general public. Then came the brochures.

Fig5 The students are taking part in our activities

During the summer vacation, the main period when we built our platform, we mainly exchanged our ideas online. We have a joint group chat, and some of the team members are in another team's modeling group chat. USTC team provided a mass of practical ideas and online-resource for us to set up our ideal database . They suggested the website of brenda is excellent for us to search enzymes and distinguish the pathway with greater efficiency. Also, they provided us with some common properties of biomolecules and chemical skills ,which laid the principle fundament to the our software.

Fig 6 Organization chart supplied for us (part)

At the same time, we also provided them with help in the design of web UI, such as the animation effect of the web page and some code improvement suggestions.

After the completion of the basic functions of the project, we hope to incorporate more factors about industrial production into our software, hoping it can be used in practice. At the same time, USTC team wanted to seek some factory experience for help. So we visited the Anhui Lianchuang Biological Medicine Co., LTD together. After communicating with their principals, we visited their factories and communicated with their researchers. Members of USTC team discussed how to convert ketones into amines to accomplish their medicine carrier. And We consulted on the practical consideration that industry needs to take into account when screening enzymes. Also, the researchers provided relevant production data as samples to test our analysis platform. Mutual visiting to the factory facilitated both of us. We decided to take the activity of the enzyme into account on the basis of the original software and added it to the criteria for evaluating the quality of the results.

Fig.7 mutual visiting to Anhui Lianchuang Biological Medicine Co., LTD

At the late stage of the project, we hold joint group meetings frequently to discuss the progress of the project and the possibility of optimization. During this period, our project has reached the testing stage, where USTC team tested our platform and compared our results with their manual screening consequences. Besides, they provided comments on our tools from the perspective of users and students, and offering some practical suggestions on Interface optimization.