Collaboration

-Collaborations-

"If you have an apple and I have an apple, and we exchange apples, we both still only have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea, and we exchange ideas, we each now have two ideas."

This year, we had the honor of collaborating with six other iGEM teams to work together, sharing our ideas from different corners of the world to push forward each other’s project goals.

Mingdao iGEM team

Mingdao iGEM team and our team have had close collaborations because both of us are from Taichung City in Taiwan. In the beginning, we got to know their project design and problems with Salmonella in a meetup. We advised them to clone the synthetic gene expression vector carrying glucose transporter gene from the bacteria and then assemble with the promoter.

Furthermore, we helped them contact a lab PI, Dr. Cheng-Yang Huang, in Chung Shan Medical University who has handled the bacteria before, and then used primers designed by Mingdao to amplify the gene fragments by PCR. Salmonella is well known as a Biosafety Level 2 organism, so Mingdao could avoid the safety issue of Salmonella through the collaboration.

On the other hand, we really appreciate Mingdao iGEM team’s help and advice when we received synthetic DNA from IDT. Since it is our team’s first time participating in iGEM, we were not much familiar with Biobrick and subcloning BioBrick parts. Luckily, Dr. Phil Chen, the instructor of Mingdao igem team, and his students have actually completed in total at least 28 BioBrick parts this year. They did us a favor by subcloning BioBrick parts and shared valuable experience in the section about medal criteria.

Mingdao:
The results of colony PCR with VF2 and VR primers on the transformed colonies.
Left gel: F420-Dependent Glucose-6-phosphate Dehydrogenase/pSB1C3 (1320 bp)
Right gel: T7 promoter & Lac operator and RBS from PET-29a/pSB1C3 (397 bp)

CSMU_NCHU_Taiwan:
The amplified DNA fragments of glucose transporter genes by PCR from gDNA of Salmonella typhimurium LT2.
Lanes 1. crr (510 bp); 2. RBS-crr (528 bp); 3. ptsG (1434 bp); 4. RBS-ptsG (1452bp); 5. 1128 (1497 bp); 6. RBS-1128 (1515 bp); 7. Positive control:
STM3098 (423 bp), Appl Environ Microbiol. 2006.

OUC-China iGEM team

By means of collaboration hub provided by iGEM HQ, it is convenient to get in touch with OUC-China iGEM team. According to the Collaboration Request, we understood that they were investigating Aquatic organisms’ outbreak caused by water eutrophication and looking for collaboration. As a result, we not only shared our local experiences about eutrophication in Taiwan but also documented several governmental reports, online Data database and academic papers in National Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations in Taiwan for them. Similarly, they shared lots of information and toughed us to model out project by Michaelis - Menten equation.

Tianjin iGEM team

The issue of containing environmental hazards caused by heavy metal pollution is a worldwide problem that must be solved by the power of all mankind. It was our pleasure work with Tianjin igem team to establish their database. We collected and organized a document about many case reports of metal pollution in Taiwan ,and shared a detailed investigation completed by Taiwan Environmental Informational Association(TEIA). It not only contain database within ‘Contaminated Sites Map’ from Environmental Protection Agency and ‘Taiwan Ssurgo Database’ from Taiwan Agriculture Research Institute Council of Agriculture ,but also gave a visualized map to show all information. Besides, we expressed our protein in yeast this year. Tianjin iGEM team kindly gave many recommendations to culture yeast and to construct the shuttle vector.

NCKU_Tainan iGEM team

We had a face-to-face meeting with them in National Cheng Kung University. They interviewed us about their environmental protection project, and we also showed our project to them. With their suggestions, we found a new method to present our project more clearly through the collaboration, where we felt more connected with other iGEMers. We are sincerely thankful for their interview and hospitality.

CCU_Taiwan iGEM team

This year, CCU_Taiwan is joining iGEM for the first time, just like us. Under the same circumstances, we built strong connections and collaborations throughout this summer. We asked them for a favor to measure the concentration of MSMEG5998 in supernatant and pellet to test the solubility of our recombinant enzyme. This experiment played an important role in our project because the results implied the efficiency of Thioredoxin. We encountered some problems that needed to be tackled back then. CCU_Taiwan generously helped us redo the SDS-PAGE experiment and provided us with the data. In return, we helped them in plasmid construction. At the beginning, they planned to digest their plasmid with two restriction endonucleases simultaneously and ligated with a new part, but they failed. As a result, we told them our Double Digests protocol, and suggested that they use High-Fidelity (HF®) restriction enzymes rather than fast digest enzyme. Therefore, the problem was then solved.

The SDS PAGE Coomassie G-250 staining result revealed that the synthetic MSMEG5998 fusion protein dissolved more in the supernatant (13000Su) compare to the pellet (13000P) of the cell lysate, indicating that the solubility is great. This result matched with our experiment.

NYMU-Taipei iGEM team

NYMU-Taipei is the first iGEM team in Taiwan to have participated, and their teacher, Prof. Chang, has extensive experience in iGEM competition. We seeked some advice about forming an iGEM team, and how to integrate a project. In return, we gave them some information about some professors in National Taiwan Ocean University whose specialty were focus on question similar to their project.