Team:AHUT-ZJU-China/Partnership
AHUT-ZJU-China
Partnership
This is our 8th time to participate in iGEM.
Introduction
In April, because of the influence of COVID-19,during the blockade, the ZJU-China team informed us of their progress in studying Magnetotactic bacteria. We first contacted them and held a conference call todis cuss our two projects to see if a partnership could be established. The idea is to help each other from a scientific point of view during the competition, and to help each other in any other way (communicating in our projects, providing advice, sharing literature search skills and so forth.).
They planed to produce a contrast agent that specifically targeted breast cancer cells. This contrast agent is based on biochemical substances produced by bacteria. And we wanted to continue to work on CO2 capturer, but we can't use our own laboratory because of the pandemic, and we need the help of ZJU-China team.
Establishing our partnership
Since April, our team could not enter the laboratory until the end of the iGEM game because of COVID-19 's pandemic. ZJU-China team told us that they could help us do some experiments. We agree to the following partnership: our team will provide theoretical advice in exchange, and their team will do wet laboratory experiments for us. In order to achieve this partnership, we held a number of teleconference with their team and exchanged views on our project. First of all, many contacts with ZJU-iGEM team have been devoted to planning and preparing for the implementation of experiments in our lab. These things are done by Yifan Zhu.
Next, our lab team set out to write the agreement and list every itemand all consumables needed. Then, we started the experiment in early August, keeping calling ZJU-iGEM team every day to advise them on the current status of the experiment, exchanging results, solving possible problems with each other, and getting advice from them. In addition, we wrote weekly tracking documents and send them so that they can keep a summary of the workflow and track progress.
Perfect ending
All in all, we have a deep memory of this partnership. We are very grateful that ZJU-iGEM team can help with the experiment. We built such a partnership because it enabled us to learn new things, exchange projects and get to know the incredible iGEMer. If COVID-19 never existed, it would be nice to meet the ZJU-iGEM team at Giant Jamboree in Boston!