Team:AHUT China/Collaborations
Meeting with Nanjing Agricultural University:
In the process of talking with team leaders and the students in charge of each module, we had a brief understanding of the content of their project, and put forward a lot of practical and useful suggestions for the problems they are facing.
Below is a brief summary of our proposal:
1.Human Practice:
We both have expressed great interest in the Best integrated Human Practise Prize. Therefore we shared our HP content with each other and worked together to study the award criteria for the gold medal and decided that we will improve our activities.
2. Project:
Members in Nanjing Agricultural University did a survey among farmers in rural areas, but the results are not pleasant enough. We made some relative constructive suggestions.
Question 1: At present, there are far too few studies on yeast. And there is no accurate data on the sequence of yeast promoter gene.
Answer:
1. Find a relevant company to help the sequencing;
2. There is a mentor doing yeast-related research in Tsinghua University. Contact him for help;
3. Contact other teams who has similar needs and apply for the iGEM authorities for publication of relevant information.
Question 2: The government did not publish the data of the amount of vomit toxin in wheat products in the market.
Answer:
1. Apply for checking the official information from the China Food and Drug Administration;
2 Go to the market get sampling by buying wheat products, and then carry out vomit toxin test.
Question 3: The yeast is eucaryote. Compared with the Escherichia coli, the experiment of competent cell culture and plasmid importation are more difficult and time-consuming, so that the project progress will be slow.
Answer:
1.Optimize the yeast. Screen more suitable yeast to act as a chassis organism through related experiments;
2.It is recommended that the project be completed in steps. For example, do wheat vomit toxin research this year and rice related pathogenic toxin research next year. In this way, the research of main crop can be completed.
Question 4: The sustainability of the project needs to be improved. Answer: Apply for Entrepreneurship Project in NAU and industrialize this project. With the development of school’s Entrepreneurship Project and financial support, this research can be carried out more consistently. If you can find a company to collaborate with, the project will help the community even more, which will lead to deeper research by teammates.
Question 5: When using drones to monitor whether or not the wheat crop is infected with the virus, it requires a high quality of camera pixels. And the characteristics of the wheat are from a top view, which has a large difference in the picture of the diseased wheat in database.
Answer: Set up automatic cameras on the ground around the wheat field. This change has four advantages: The camera is close to the wheat plant so that the camera pixel required is not high; The picture in the horizontal direction is coincident with the picture in the database, which can improve the accuracy of the recognition;
3. The plan is continuous monitoring so that the whole wheat growth cycle can be monitored for its disease;
4. Compared with drones, it is more more economical which is very helpful to the industrialization of this project.
Video-based collaboration:
We have filmed China's bio-safety education video with Shanghai University of Science and Technology and 11 other universities. We undertook the part of design and shooting of the eighth episode, laboratory reagent leakage treatment.
1.Background
We were connected by Shanghai University of Science and Technology. The lack of teaching materials in the field of bio-safety education in China, the obsolete of the laboratory-safe instructional videos and the disconnection between the content and the actual work of today's laboratories caused us making some educational videos. We aimed to strengthen students' bio-safety awareness and correct students’ operation which do not conform to safety standards. We hope to improve the level of bio-safety education in China and the safety awareness of people with the help of the Yale Laboratory Safety Handbook and other foreign bio-safety education materials.
2.Timeline
September 22nd
Shanghai University of Science and Technology and Anhui University, together with 11 other colleges and universities's iGEM team held a conference call. During that call, we confirmed the theme, scheduled time.
September 23rd -September 26th
Writing scripts, confirming the actors and actress, shooting location, props, shooting time and so on.
3.Overview
We choose "reagent leak treatment" as the theme and narrated a story through the form of melodrama. Two students missed the teacher's teaching because they were late in experiment class. They accidentally overturned the test tube containing ether while dropping the ether. Being panic, they opened the doors and windows immediately and asked the teacher for help. After the teacher handled the accident, he educated the students and mentioned what had happened before: solid reagent leakage treatment (take the case of sodium bromide leakage as an example) and the leakage treatment of ultra clean workbench medium.
4. Results
We've uploaded these videos to YouTube and Bilibili, and we've got a lot of browsing and clicks. We've got compliments, criticisms and suggestions. We will humbly accept the proposal and always make efforts to improve the safety awareness of people!
Click here to watch our videos!
YouTube and Bilibili, a popular Chinese video-sharing website.
Teams participated the production:
- ShanghaiTech University
- University of Chinese Academy of Science
- Tianjin University
- Tianjin University of Science & Technology
- University of Electronic Science and Technology of China
- Beijing Normal University
- Wuhan University
- Huazhong Agricultural University
- Anhui University of Technology
- Nanjing Agricultural University
- Fujian Agriculture and Forestry University
To Wuwei Middle School
We talked with the leaders in the school meeting room and briefly introduced iGEM competition and its impact to them. They showed great interest in the competition and sought professional help from us. We proposed to help them in building teams and following up the project next year and to provide them with laboratory and teacher assistance.
We visited the creative classroom of Wuwei Middle School. The headmaster introduced the outstanding creations of the students and the patent awards to us, and highlighted the content of one of the students ' international awards.
We gave the lecture to the freshmen of Wuwei Middle School in their assembly hall. Before the lecture, we distributed questionnaires and played the relevant videos to the students. And then Professor Xiangrong Xu introduced what is iGEM, what is synthetic biology and our school’s projects in last few years and the outstanding projects of high School group. Our team members introduced this year's project to the students and finally, our leader introduced the American tour to the students. After the lecture, the students asked members about the details of the project. Some students asked Professor Xu for his autograph.
