Team:SCU China/Collaborations
Nowadays, collaboration between researchers plays a critical role in the process of making important breakthroughs in scientific fields. It is more and more difficult to finish a research project by individual group of researchers. As for us, helps from other iGEM teams were vital to our project improvement, experiments and human practices. In the other hand, we tried our best to gave support to those iGEMers in need as well. This year, there are totally 5 iGEM teams, SCU-WestChina, Peking, SiCAU-China, TMMU_China and Purdue collaborated with SCU_China, either through one directional help or mutual collaboration between each other. The formats of our collaboration are variable. The details of our collaboration are listed below:
As two teams from one university, we collaborated with Team SCU-WestChina closely and in depth in different aspects such as team building, project design, experiment and human practice etc.
SCU-WestChina is the newly-formed and the second team in Sichuan University, and with our help they got the “Multiple Team Discount” when registered.
SCU-WestChina is the newly-formed and the second team in Sichuan University, and with our help they got the “Multiple Team Discount” when registered.
Because SCU-WestChina didn’t have the 96-well plate with black background for fluorescence measurement and trypsin for artificial intestine fluid, which we happened to have some surplus, thus we provided them with these materials for experiment.
Because of regulations of microplate readers in College of Life Sciences, SCU, we cannot do continuous measurement in our laboratory. We asked SCU-WestChina for help and they found us a reader which could do continuous measurement in State Key Laboratory of Biotherapy (SKLB), SCU and we finished our measurement there. e. We shared the laboratory with SCU-WestChina when SKLB experienced sudden power failure.
SCU-WestChina generously gave us the verified pKD46 plasmid for RED.
This year, our project is closely related to melatonin and sleep; to obtain the real clinic data and the views from the doctors, we hoped to contact with the doctors from Center of Sleep Disorder in West China Hospital, SCU. Considering that the members of SCU-WestChina were more familiar with the doctors than us, we asked for help and they reached the doctors first and got the contact information for us, so that we could complete the following work like interview etc.
We attended the iSWU 2017 conference held by SCU-WestChina, and we discussed about each other’s project and gave suggestions on possible manipulation and optimization of the projects.
Team SCU-WestChina attended ACMA 2017 held by us. In this competition, they assist us doing some work. During the Academic Salon, the leader of SCU-WestChina presented the projects from Vilnius-Lithuania 2016 and Groningen 2012 and answered questions from the candidates. He also shared the techniques could be used in project construction and design. In the pre-thesis defense, he also served as one of the judges – he graded, commented and questioned.
We collaborated with Team SCU-WestChina, TMMU-China and UESTC-China and completed the themed exhibition on “Transgene and Human Health” held by Chengdu Library. More in the library exhibition part in Human Practice.
At the end of August, we discovered that the plasmid pLPT107 couldn’t be transformed into our own knockout strain. Then, we asked Team Peking, whose project was also related to repressilator, for help. Team Peking immediately shared the knockout strain they acquired from the authors with us. What’s more, we had intense and deep discussions on the usage and verification of the strain.
Before the iSWU meet-up, team “SiCAU-China”, a new iGEM team, contacted with us for some parts in 2016 DNA distribution to prepare for their preliminary experiments. And we took those plasmids to them at the meetup.
Caused by our carelessness, we put the LUDOX in the -20 degrees centigrade as we did last year, leading to all of LUDOX in 2017 kit precipitating. However, we wanted to participate in this year’s InterLab study, which should use LUDOX as materials. Thus, we sought help in the Wechat group of “iSWU”; thankfully, team “SiCAU-China” provided us with LUDOX in their measurement kit immediately, which is vital for us to finish our InterLab study.
The suggestions from the instructors of TMMU-China made us realize that our initial design of rabies vaccine through mouth would face great uncertainty and difficulty, and drove us to choose “Rhythmic Production of Melatonin in E.coli” as our final project.
We had video chat with team “Purdue” to introduce our respective projects. In this video chat, their real condition simulation inspired us to do some experiments to simulate growth conditions in the environment of gut.
We gave some suggestions for wiki design to them.
