Overview

This year, we shared deep collaborations with a first-year team, CUG-China. Throughout the season, we exchanged countless ideas and experiences with them and helped each other in different ways. Though most of our communication were online due to the far physical distance, we communicated on any topic anywhere and anytime by fully utilizing the immediate interaction of online social applications. Through meetings and daily communications, we extend close relationship in modeling, video production, wiki, experiment, and other aspects, encouraging each other and making improvements together.

The Establishment of Partnership

At the beginning of this season, we established our friendship with CUG-China via the introduction of their PI Yidan Hu. We made discussion via online meeting about safety regulation, and attended the ARS 2022 together. On July 19, the leader of CUG-China showed up in Xiamen for an in-person meeting with us, and the other members of CUG-China participated online. During the meeting, both teams discussed the project of each other together. After discussion, we shared experience of how to design BioBrick parts with CUG-China, helped them highlighting some “dos and don’ts” in the process of characterizing parts. We also shared our understanding of parts-related criteria with them. After the meeting, both teams decided to run on deeper collaborations with each other in various aspects of project design and execution.

The Co-operation of Experiment

To proof our design works, we need to express the protein TTPA-his, PirA-his, rLvAPN1-his. However, Coomassie blue staining is not sufficient to proof the expression of them. CUG-China offered to perform western blot for us, and the expression of these proteins are conducted and confirmed according to the protocol we provided. For experiment details, please visit the result page.

Fig. 1 Western blot of BBa_K4195007, BBa_K4195137, BBa_K4195038.

The detailed advice

Click to know what we are chatting about

Part1

XMU-China: Do you receive the email about the greeting board?

CUG-China: Of course, yes. With such a tight time limit, what kind of artwork should we draw and upload an artwork? What kind of artwork do you think is more suitable for it?

XMU-China: I believe the main theme of the greeting board is to attract more attention to your project. Maybe you can try some illustration of the project background as we did.

CUG-China: Cool. By the way, how's your promotion video? We decide to combine animation and live action together and make impressive special effects in this video.

XMU-China: Yeah, it sounds like a good way to enrich your content and make the video more vivid. We used a short live action in the first several seconds of the promotion video to make an intro, which comes from our visit to the fisherfolks. Adding the real scene of a shrimp pond into the video can make it more convincing. And for the rest of those abstract principles, we chose animation to make them less boring and much easier to understand.

CUG-China: It sounds cool! Good luck with it, and let me know if you need any help!

Part2

XMU-China: Hey! We’re picking backgrounds for our pages, do you have good choice for the partnership page? We’d like a picture from you!

CUG-China: Sure! Do you prefer environmental portraits or landscapes?

XMU-China: Portraits will be great. Thanks for your picture!

Part3

CUG-China: Your artworks are so unique! Would you like to draw some pictures for us? We will use them in our wiki page as illustrations.

XMU-China: Oh, thank you for liking it! What can I help you to draw?

CUG-China: Maybe you can draw something that has lab elements, such as a microscope.

XMU-China: I’ll try my best!

Part1

CUG-China: Hi! Did you know how to apply fonts in the wiki and customize the font inserted?

XMU-China: You need to input the link of the TIFF file by URL in font-face. If you want to use a certain font, you could directly use the name of the defined font-family to refer the font. Besides, a font only needs to be set once in font-face. By the way, don’t forget to create a responsive web design, then the layout can change to adapt to different devices.

CUG-China: On it!

Part2

CUG-China: We have browsed your wiki in the 2021 season. Your Notebook page of last year looks so cool! Can we adopt some element of it into our page?

XMU-China: Sure, but don’t forget to refer our page at the bottom of your wiki.

CUG-China: And I’m also confused about the “Award” part on the wiki. What should we put on this page? Do we need to finish it before the wiki freeze by predicting which award we will win?

XMU-China: In fact, we will have another chance to edit our wiki after Jamboree. Wiki thaw will be on October 30 and you can complete the “Award” part at that time.

CUG-China: Thank you SOOOOOO much!

CUG-China: Can you tell us more about parts? It’s a novel concept for us since it’s our first year participating in this competition. What should we do to create a part?

XMU-China: The “part” contains “basic part” and “composite part”. Like a rocket, the composite part is composed of some basic parts and each of them plays an indispensable role during the launch of the rocket.

CUG-China: Do you mean the composite part includes the basic part?

XMU-China: Not exactly. For example, “rLvAPN1-his” is a basic part, “I0500-B0034- rLvAPN1-his-B0015” is a composite part. The composite part can execute a certain function designed by the basic parts it includes. In this case, “I0500-B0034- rLvAPN1-his-B0015" can express protein rLvAPN1-his when induced by arabinose.

XMU-China: Besides, the BioBrick RFC[10] needs to be complied during the parts construction. It’s an assembly standard that is compatible with the majority of parts in the Registry database.

CUG-China: Sure, we will.

XMU-China: How's your project modeling? Is it going on well?

CUG-China: Well, we intended to associate the gene expression process, including transcription and translation, of messenger molecular, repressor protein FleQ, and reporter gfp with the response kinetics. But we had no idea how to depict it.

XMU-China: Exactly, it is a gene expression model that can be written in a few ordinary differential equations. From the very beginning, you need to get enough data as time progress to construct it and make a sensitivity analysis of your ordinary differential equations.

CUG-China: It sounds tricky. Would you mind helping us to construct the model?

XMU-China: Not at all.

CUG-China: Our project aims at offering a biosensor to drug screening, but who should we ask to learn more about how to do it?

XMU-China: What you’re thinking is called human practice. Human practice includes a series of activities around your project, such as interviewing professors majoring in the related fields, stakeholders and so on.

CUG-China: But where should we start looking?

XMU-China: Take it easy, you can start with visiting some professors in the medical field, as you said, to assess the possibility of your design. Maybe they will point out some problems and inspire you to refine your design. You can also ask for help if you need professional help to carry out clinic tests.

CUG-China: Seems like a good way to improve our project!

XMU-China: Yes! Why not communicate with drug developers to get more tangible advice?

CUG-China: Cool!