Team:CSMU NCHU Taiwan/Collaborations

-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.