We met up with team MaiaPotion (Zhejiang_United) on August 15th, 2022, in a conference room at ZhangJiang, Shanghai. This was our first time collaborating, and also a great experience for us and benefits our future better hosting more collaborations.
Based on their introduction, their project aims to use sweet potato residue wasted in agricultural production as a source of glucose and use Saccharomyces cerevisiae as a cell factory to replace E. coli to synthesize 2'-FL and add it to infant milk powder formula. The infant formula with 2'-FL is closer to breast milk in terms of nutrient composition than other formulae.
Photo of the meetup with the team MaiaPotion (Zhejiang_United) and our co-published articles
-Script of promotion video: Through discussion, we suggested team MaiaPotion could indirectly show the strength of their product through a promotion video. For example, the protagonist in the video can use milk powder without HMOs before they try the new milk powder with HMOs.
-Organization in team routines: Our team members changed periodically between the dry lab and wet lab while team MaiaPotion has clearly separated the dry lab and the wet lab. We recommended they could focus more on communication between dry and wet teams to avoid any misunderstandings regarding the project. Actually, the wet lab could empower the education campaign for the dry lab and the dry lab could share the research updates including advice on experiments from expert interviews to the wet lab for optimizing their laboratory work.
-Online lecture: According to the sharing of the MaiaPotion team on holding an online lecture, we learned about how they targeted specific stakeholders to prepare presentation slides that were easy for audiences to understand, this helped us a lot when we planned our online lecture later on.
-Co-published article on WeChat: After discussion, we realized that our two teams both utilized biotechnology CRISPR. therefore, we decided to collab with each other to post an educational article about CRISPR and promote the charm of biotechnology. After several rounds of communications, finally, we posted this article on each WeChat Official Account, respectively, and credited each other on the article topic and the page end. This article included the benefits and drawbacks of CRISPR technology and also mentioned some of the ethical problems caused by CRISPR.
On August 17th, 2022, we met up online with the team EH-Cheers (SuZhou_Union) from Beijing. Their team aims to increase the ability of saccharomyces cerevisiae to produce ethyl caproate to improve the quality of Luzhou-flavor liquor.
Online meetup with the team EH-Cheers (SuZhou_Union)
-Educational article writing: Our own articles personified Helicobacter pylori as a naughty boy who messes up the Gastrointestinal environment in the human body and this article is quite popular. So we suggested that they can also use a humorous tone when writing their educational articles for easier understanding and attract more audience to follow them.
-Expert interview: Both teams planned to consult some experts for professional insights for the project and we have conducted several interviews already. We shared some of our interview experiences to help the EH-Cheers team better prepare and conduct the expert interview. One of our suggestions is that they could assess the number of interview questions to control the interview time duration and leave some maneuver time in case of additional questions that came up during the interview.
-Street interview: Since our own offline interview didn’t go much well as we expected, so we strongly recommended they shall select various spots for interviewing focus groups rather than staying in one spot.
-Online fundraising: Both teams decided to launch charity sales. Different from our offline fundraising campaign, the EH-Cheers team chose to start their sale online. They created an online store on WeChat for selling their peripheral products. We borrowed their idea and also opened an online store to expand our charity sale channels.
-Educational article topics: When talking about educational articles, we had trouble deciding the artcle topics and lacking in ideas of the contents. In this regard, the EH-Cheers team suggested we could write an educational article about biotechnology we utilized in our experiments and this new idea widens our diversity of contents.
