In the past year, we cooperated with NJMU for many times. This communication not only effectively deepened our understanding about each other, but also enhanced our comprehension about both depression and infantile autism.

    On Apr 26th, we commenced a compact lecture and invited professor Zhilin Wang, from Center for Mental Health Education and Research in NJMU, and one graduate student majoring in medicine from Xi’an Jiaotong University, to introduce basic knowledge and facts about autism and depression, to raise public awareness and to answer common confusions.

==========================================================================

    Due to the similarity between NJMU and us, we organized a lecture together to inform more college students of knowledge about mental disorders. To take advantage of the similar goal and inclination to better inspire us and polish our designs, on May 10th, we had a meeting about our own projects.

     In the beginning, every member from the two teams made a self-introduction and our leader described the general design of experiments and orientation of our human practice. This was followed by an introduction of the background and guidelines of their project, which emphasized on utilizing synthetic biology to treat autism and to detect the abnormity of mitochondria. The next session was free discussion at which we exchanged ideas about how to improve our design and modify our current deficiencies. All of us enjoyed the sparks of inspiration springing out so much that we hoped that in the future two teams could engage in deeper communication.

    On Jun 26th, our team took part in an online meetup aiming at popularizing our project to more people. Also, there were many other participants, and we considered listening to ideas from other teams a strong inspiration to ourselves. The whole meeting was divided into two parts, the one in the morning and another one in the afternoon respectively, and our members introduced our designs associated with depression followed by a Q&A session. Many teams were confused about the way to fuse functions of our drugs with existing treatments, and this was answered later in the Q&A session. Of course, other teams offered us a lot of excellent advice.

    DO & GO,a community that consists of patients with depression, serves as a warm and harmony harbor for them to rest and pour out feelings. Considering that as a team that focuses on depression, we need to figure out the effective way to alleviate patients’ apprehension and understand their true demands, we arranged a meeting with them. This meeting was held on May 2nd and was attended by members from each group of DO & GO.

    First, each group’s leader introduced its category: how this group could assist community members and what were the common symptoms of their members. What impressed us was that most of this community had been suffering from long-term and grueling drug treatment.
    Then, after our team illustrated our project, many people from DO & GO showed great interest. Increasing people talked about their specific symptoms, problems and confusions, which helped us in determining the final form of our probiotics.

    It was worth mentioning that one graduate student majoring in medicine had been giving pertinent suggestions, including highlighting the health function instead of treatment function of products and emphasizing the characteristics of periodical production.

    As the host of Central China iGEM Communication, we were honored to invite our friendly partners—HUST, HBUT, CUG and HZAU—to attend the meeting on Jul 30th in our school. Every team presented their own projects and then we held a heated discussion about the details and improvement of each of their designs. Also, to ensure that all aspects were covered in this meeting, we also exchanged ideas concerning mathematic models. Although our projects paid attention to different areas and fields, the goal of our iGEMers was the same, which was to utilize synthetic biology and our innovations to benefit mankind and the society.

    We came up with the idea of building an online platform where each team member can post their questions or provide their answer to an existing question. Users of the platform can either ask a question that they met during wet lab work or modeling, or share their experiences in these areas. Initially named the Intestinal Association, the platform was maintained and used by three teams: iGEM WHU-China, iGEM NJMU-China, and iGEM HZAU-China. Apart from the contacts, introduction, and design of each team, a discussion board was also set up for free discussion on the new findings related to intestinal microbiota.

    Different from institutions from universities, enterprises value selling forms of products, how to gain profits more effectively and how to promote technology to market more quickly. Considering that enterprises are very helpful for the preparation and formation of our probiotics, we organized a meeting on May 7th to consult the staff from Bluepha company, which is an experienced company that uses engineered bacteria to produce banausic materials, about the better ways to connect synthetic biology with real-world application and to meet the patients’ demands.

And they answered us from a different perspective, telling us to grasp chances accurately, to figure out the scale of market and to amplify our uniqueness. This meeting greatly broadened our horizons.

    MGI is an organization affiliated with BGI, which is a renowned biotechnology company focusing on sequencing genome and producing kits and machines as supplements, and MGI is responsible for manufacturing automated sequencing machines.
Knowing the interest that BGI holds in the research on Intestinal flora metagenome,

we wondered if we could consult about the abundance and proportion of these microorganisms. We paid a visit to MGI on Aug 25th to have a meeting with its staff. During this meeting, after listening to our designs and questions, they said they were indeed exploring the mysteries behind Intestinal flora and they would be glad to inform us if there was any important data or breakthrough. In the end, they praised the form of our product and gave us some advice on the future improvement.