Team:RDFZ-China/Attributions
Division of Labor Among Team Members
Student Leaders:
-Bowen Xiao
-Ziyuan Zhao
Student leaders serve as points of contact between the PIs, the student members and the HQ. They are responsible for organizing team members and holding meetings, contacting the HQ, keeping track of deadlines, arranging collaborations with other teams, making plans for future experiments and other matters, no matter how trivial they are. As two iGEMmers with previous lab experiences, Zhao and Xiao are also taking the lead in the wet lab. Zhao is also the person who came up with the idea of using lmrA to transport products toxic to the host.
Coordinator:
-Zeyu Tang (Feanor)
The coordinator is responsible for keeping track of team activities. He records the participation of each team member. He is also responsible for works such as ordering primers and reagents.
Team Human Practice:
-Kexin Zhu (Leader)
-Siqing Wang
-Junhao Yang
-Xuanyu Zhou
-Haining Wang
-Yiqing Zhang
Team Human Practice includes the social issues specialists in the team. They are responsible for both the human practice part of the project and exploring the larger background of our product – for instance, how oil spills have been tackled in the past.
Team Technology:
-Yuwei Guo
-Yiqing Zhang
-Rui Deng
-Kaiying Shan
-Ziyuan Zhao
-Bowen Xiao
-Zeyu Tang
They are responsible for lab protocols, and the biology/chemistry knowledge we encounter in the process. Many of them contributed to the formation of our project idea.
Team Computer:
-Zeyu Tang
-Yuze Cao
Team Computer is responsible for model construction and hardware design. They have taught themselves html in less than three hours.
Finance Manager:
-Haining Wang
The finance manager is in charge of our fundraising efforts. This is no easy work. For more information, see “crowdfunding” in https://2017.igem.org/Team:RDFZ-China/Engagement.
Collaboration Managers:
-Junying Wang
-Siqing Wang
-Zeyu Tang
They are responsible for establishing contact and carrying out collaboration between different teams.
Team Art design:
-Yishen Shen
-Yuyin Yang
-Junying Wang
They designed our logos and our wiki pages.
Travel Manager:
-Zihan Liu
She looked for hotels in Boston and flights to Boston, and collected our preferences for them.
Previous Works on Related Subjects
The following are previous iGEM projects that we have based our own project upon. We have listed links to their websites, and exactly what we have learnt from them. We have also done some “literature review”, where we collected our other ideas from previous papers, but those are listed as references within each page.
1. 2012 Lyon-INSA’s wiki allowed us to learn about the protein sfp, and confirmed our idea on how surfactin can be used. https://2012.igem.org/Team:Lyon-INSA
2. We found a part similar to our ideal device in Newcastle, 2010. While they used swrA, we were planning to use swrC (although we did not submit it to the registry) and lmrA. https://2010.igem.org/Team:Newcastle/Swarming
3. From TU-Delft’s excellent project in alkane degradation, we developed an idea to use their parts in our project. https://2010.igem.org/Team:TU_Delft
4. Thanks to the responsible documentation of Heidelberg 2013, we figured out the relationship between multiple 4'-phosphopantetheinyl transferases present in the registry. https://2013.igem.org/Team:Heidelberg
Acknowledgement
Principle Investigators:
We would like to thank our principle investigators, Mr. Weifeng Nian and Ms. Wenfeng Liu, for their support and guidance. They have
Mr. Nian represented the team in the iGEM Asia Team Leaders’ Workshop. He provided the team with classrooms for weekly meetings, and helped contact Ms. Liu for lab access. After Ziyuan Zhao presented his idea on lmrA, Mr. Nian suggested that he should look for a more practical application. Later, Mr. Nian motivated our team to work and to reflect upon our previous mistakes. He gave us advice on how the team should be managed. He also encouraged us to think about how we can best contribute to and learn from the iGEM process.
Ms. Liu taught us plenty of tricks and tips for doing safe and effective lab work, and helped debug the experiment procedures when things go wrong. When our transformations were unsuccessful, she looked at the protocols we use carefully, compared them to what she normally used, and pointed out steps that might require modification. She taught us how we can contact biotech companies, purchase the right reagents, and send in samples for sequencing. She and Mr. Nian took turns to supervise us in the labs. When building our hardware, she helped find all the necessary materials from different labs in our school.
Other Teams and Organizations:
Peking University
Yihao Zhang, instructor of the Peking iGEM team, invited us to synthetic biology course in Peking University. He provided us with tutorship in forming possible project ideas (for instance, he encouraged us to think about fun and applicable topics). Then, he and Dr. Xuan Wang assessed the quality of our initial project idea regarding surfactin. He identified an unrealistic project goal: applying CRISPRa to our chassis. He also helped us connect with the entrepreneurs in Bluepha. During the InterLab, Peking University team provided us with the transformed bacteria, and instructed us on how to perform the study.
SDSZ-China
They kindly provided us with seven gene parts when our distribution kit was temporarily unavailable.
Lab of Dr. Tao Chen, Tianjin
They supplied our Bacillus subtilis 168, and provided us with transformation protocols.
Bluepha
They kindly showed us their wonderful lab, and provided an opportunity to communicate with the SHSBNU team. Dr. Xuan Wang provided us biological parts from the distribution kits in the previous years.
UCAS
They have also provided us with a biological part from distribution kits in the previous years.
We have also collaborated with many other teams, where we helped each other. For information on our collaboration efforts, see: https://2017.igem.org/Team:RDFZ-China/Collaboration
Team Oxford
Their dry lab coordinators, Chun Ngai Au and Helen Ren, kindly provided help in modeling. They wrote a document about how to create ODE(ordinary differential equation) functions to analyze pathways inside the cell. Besides, they answered many questions related to this through communication with Zeyu Tang by e-mail
