After ASU iGEM and UBCO iGEM reached out to us saying they want to promote plant synthetic biology through continuing building on the Phototroph community that the teams last year have built, we immediately accept their offer. Other teams including JHU iGEM, HKU iGEM, UIncheon, and iGEM Thessaly were also in this collaboration.
As the only high school teams in this community this year, we had the opportunity to discuss and learn from other teams working on synthetic biology projects incorporating phototrophic chassis while working on our own project through the Phototroph Slack and various meetups.
The goal of this collaboration is to promote phototroph synthetic biology and to build upon the work of the phototroph community last year made. Together we came up with an idea to make video protocols to better illustrate how experiments can be carried out using phototrophs. We can imagine how this would lay a foundation for future teams working with phototrophic chassis!
Here are our video protocols:
Our team initiated an iGEMer meetup to give more teams an opportunity to receive advice from experts and peers first. We planned the whole iGEMer meetup and made the promotional poster for this meetup. We also collect questionnaires about this meetup and regularly contacted different teams who want to join this meetup.
Later, Worldshaper-HZBioX reached out to us saying they want to co-host this iGEMer meetup, they help us with publicizing and ensuring that as many teams as possible participate in this academic exchange meeting. At the same time, they also invited Dr. Wu Jiequn as the judge of our academic exchange meeting, responsible for asking questions and commenting on each team after the speech.
Also, both teams contributed two members as the host of this meetup and the moderators Eichorst Tian and Susie Feng were from our team.
This academic exchange meeting, jointly organized by our team and Worldshaper-HZBioX, officially began at 1:30 p.m. on September 10. Overall. Nine teams participated in the meeting, sharing their ideas and responding to inquiries from different iGEM teams who were considering their initiatives. In the round of questions from the experts, each team gained a lot from the advice they obtained.
The meeting was very successful
Together with the other six teams, we successfully conducted an online live broadcast for the public via WeChat app on July 10 after co-planning and organization. We present our project and set up the live link on WeChat. Other teams make the posters or host the meeting.
It was intended to let the public know about projects in synthetic biology. At the same time, there is a first mutual understanding between the team. After the project introduction of each team, everyone had an understanding of each other's projects and the public respond actively. This laid foundation for follow-up teamwork.
After Eichorst Tian reached out to different teams requesting wiki support, Uni Patras Hellas responded. During summer, we coordinated with each other via meetups and emails.
On July 28, 2022, we conducted our first meeting and discussed our project ideas and iGEM experiences. We exchanged our project ideas and receive feedback from each other. At the same time, both of us talked about the difficulties we are now facing.
Through the meeting, Uni Patras Hellas suggested they need help financially. We helped promote their project through Chinese social media and crowdfunding platforms. We have raised 1444 RMB for them.
At the same time, they aided our wiki design by designing a few components for our wiki.
During this meetup, we introduced our team's projects and interacted with experts. We happily accepted the opinions of experts and actively answered the questions raised by the experts. We acknowledged that we can commercialize the roots we made, which help guide our Human Practice efforts, expanding it into commercialization for the final results.
We gained a lot during this 2-day meetup happening on August 6th and 7th. As the hardware lead, Helen Shi also actively looked for teams related to our project. Eventually, we found Worldshaper-Nanjing who want to develop a storage box for the antibiotics they made. We discussed with each other which material we both want to use. Susie Feng and Eichorst Tian introduced the project in this meetup and received feedback from experts on the project. We came up with ideas for developing a model through this meetup. At the same time, we have also learned about the project themes and progress of many teams which help guide further work in our team.
From August 18th to 22nd, we attended the 9th Conference of China iGEMer Community. The conference's theme, "Life Meets Everything," inspired us to consider and investigate synthetic biology's place in various disciplines of scientific inquiry and business.
We learned how judges judge our project through the iGEM judge committee workshop, and how to evaluate our current human practice progress through the workshops.
Also, through exchanges of different opinions benefitted through the vast number of participants in CCiC.