1 SFLS
We met the Shenzhen Foreign Language School IGEM team at the Shenzhen IGEMers meet-up and presented our projects to each other. Both teams applied CRISPR system in the projects, so we contacted the SFLS team and hoped to receive some insights on how to model our project. The modeling process was arduous, but we helped each other out and got satisfying results.
At times, their projects were facing a crucial problem of off-target effects, and after comparing several articles on predicting off-target effects in mathematical ways, we recommended them a better method named "Cutting Frequency Determination (CFD) scoring method" to help improve their model. We also supported their modeling group by introducing biological theory to the math-work members.
In addition to modeling, we also engaged with them on safety and integrated human practice. We shot a BSL videos: SFLS provided the Chinese scripts and edited the videos while BGIC-Union provided the English scripts and resources for the content of the footage. The video was posted on
bilibili .The SFLS team also kindly offered us the chance to join them in the several lectures educating high school and primary school students on synthetic biology, cancer and CRISPR, and was able to present our project to more promising teenagers that may become future IGEMers and contribute to the synthetic biology community. See
human practice session for more info.
We appreciated the responsible and capable members from Shenzhen Foreign Language School () and the constructive help they offered very much. And we were glad to be able to help them with uploading the wiki and answered some questions on the details of the competition such as poster design and plasmids drying and delivering.
2 SCIE
Another Shenzhen team we collaborate with is
@SIATxSCIE. We presented our projects to each other on the Shenzhen Meet-up they hosted. (We liked their gifts very much!) Their project aimed at transforming the of resilience of tardigrades into the engineered organism, and we found out the proteins they worked on—TDPs (tardigrades intrinsically disorded proteins)—could help us construct our test-paper. They borrowed pet28a plasmids from us to construct their parts but could only provide us with the bacteria, but not the purified protein product we wanted due to time limitation.
3 Meet up
We participated and presented our project in two very meaningful IGEMers Meet-ups, one local, the Shenzhen IGEMers Meet-up hosted by @SCIE and @SFLS; one national, CCiC(Central China iGEM Consortium) , which is the largest IGEMers Meet-up in China with both university and high school teams as participants.
The Shenzhen IGEMers Meet-up was much smaller, but we were still able to learn about the competition as well as the projects of the teams around Shenzhen. First, Dr. Zhang Haoqian, the CFO of Bluepha, taught us the essence of IGEM competition: Innovation and responsibility for developing the project; Originality + roundness for presenting our project; Sophistication when designing the bio-circuit. He also reminded us of the importance of several competition requirements, especially the judging form. Then he talked about his own experience with IGEM and encouraged us to work as an efficient team in the following months before the wiki freeze.
We presented our project for the first time in this meet-up, and discovered several points we could improve on. The other teams’ presentation inspired us a lot and we continued to perfect our presentation for the CCiC meet-up as well as the Giant Jamboree. Dr. Zhang called us to pay attention to highlight the distinguished feature of our project comparing to the Peking 2015 project to make our story more complete. This was a truly valuable advice.
Besides the project presentation in Shenzhen College of International Education, we had the opportunity to enjoy the delicious food around the campus + the special gifts we received from the team members:
4 NUDT-China
In the August of 2017, we went to FAFU CCiC (Fujian Agricultural and Forestry University Conference of China’s iGEMers Community) and had a meet-up with team NUDT-China. We took advantage of their parts (sHRPN-dcas9 and sHRPC-dcas9) design of last year and tested the function of those parts. Their parts reduced our time spent on plasmid construction and improved our efficiency in signal transformation (from the target DNA concentration to luminescence). Besides, they gave us suggestions in the improvements of our split T7 report system and the design of our kit. Also, their team is very interested in our split T7 system, certifies the potential of it, and connects this system to their frontier studies. In general, we had an exchange in material and a pleasant communication with team NUDT-China.
5 JNFLS
Since our team members come from all parts of China, it is difficult for our team to make progression for our experiments in schooldays due to the distance. Team SDU-China shares the laboratory with one team member living in the same city and facilitates the experimental progress. By sharing the laboratory with SDU-China, our team transforms the plasmid sHRPN-dcas9 and sHRPC-dcas9 into competent cell DH5α, cultures the bacteria, and harvests the plasmid of larger amount. Also, we exchanged our ideas about some potential improvements in each other’s project and design.
