We have established the collaborative relationship with Jilin_China, LanZhou and ZJU_China during the competition. We have made effective communication in terms of experimental condition control and results testing, and we helped each other so that our projects progress more smoothly. We are very grateful to these teams mentioned above for help.

With Jilin_China

We had a lot of discussion with Jilin University about interlab such as experimental conditions control and operation practices. During our human practice, we want to see how the public react to their own health status, to our project, so we did a random survey online and we also went out onto the street to send out some of the questionnaires and we want to thank Jilin University for helping us to send our questionnaires in their city. This makes our findings more convincing.

Jilin_China wanted to get more opinions of their project, so we helped them interview associated professor Peiyong Liu, vice Dean of college of life and health sciences Northeastern University. We told her what Geneguard is, and discussed with her. Peiyong Liu thought the usage of Geneguard system was an innovative idea and it was feasible to control the engineered bacteria in the environment. She thought Jilin_China 's project is meaningful, and it is a nice attempt to solve this problem by using synthetic biology methods.

With LanZhou

The ecdysone receptor (ECR) plays an important role in the molting, metabolism, development and reproduction of insects. They tried to build an RNAi system to silence the ECR gene.ECR silencing can effectively reduce the expression of these key genes, thereby reducing the survival rate of insects and reproduction rate.
In their project, they need various functional vectors for dsRNA production, but the gene sequence complementarity will cause secondary structure, which is impossible to synthsize gene for one time. The task of constructing vectors is heavy. We helped them to construct hpRNA producing vector ecrL, which sped up their vectors construction progress.

For us:

Teammates of Lanzhou helped us to construct the distribution of the olfactory receptor Rho-OR1A1. Since the position of the initiation codon 64bp in the OR1A1 sequence contained the EcoRI site which did not conform to the RFC10 standard, they used the primer containing the synonymous codon to mutate the site and successfully mutated the GAA to GAG.

With ZJU_China

Another partner was ZJU_China, we had a leisure talk about projects with their teammates in their laboratory in the end of the July.We later had collaborated in fluorescence detection tests. In their project, they only observed the fluorescence by fluorescence microscope, while we used Microplate Reader to detect the EGFP expression in the hyphae of T. atroviridewe.
First, we cultured Trichoderma that has been transformed EGFP and wild Trichoderma, and then we picked mycelium for fluorescence detection, the following table for the data:

The data we provided them were more quantitatively and measurable which proved that they have succeed in expressing heterogenous gene in our aiming chassis.

For us:

The iSmeller biosensor constructed in our project will activate the cAMP pathway after binding of the odor molecule with specific olfactory receptor. To determine whether the activation of the cAMP pathway can be used as a test indicator for our reporter gene (luciferase), the igem team of Zhejiang University has helped us to make a luminescence detection by stimulation of forskolin which is a kind of adenylate cyclase activator. Demonstrating that our reporter gene is available to respond to the activation of the cAMP pathway, which further proves the feasibility of our experiment.

With NKU_China

We also helped Nankai University to verify the function of the lyase gene. We synthesize the lyase gene whose sequence from Xanthomonas oryzae bacteriophage Xp10 and transformed it into Enterobacter sp. FY-07. After we added the inducer (arabinose), it is obvious that the bacteria begin to die which will ensure that the bacteria will die after working, and will not affect the environment.

For us:

Teammates of NKU_China helped us to construct the distribution of the olfactory receptor Rho-OR1D2.

Abstract

During the competition, we realize that proper collaborations with the above team is necessary, which make our project progress more smoothly. In addition, frequent communication allows us to know about the progress of other teams to determine whether we need to speed up the pace of the experiment. But we found that the Chinese teams rarely establish a cooperative relationship with the igem teams in other countries, which may be due to geographical relations. However, we still believe that cooperation with foreign teams is necessary for we can understand each other's experimental techniques to improve our own projects. In any case, we are very grateful to the above team for our help and we hope that our friendship can last forever.