Team:ASTWS-China/Collaborations

Host an online meet up with Worldshaper-Shanghai

On the evening of August 3rd, the online meet-up held by us and Worldshaper-Shanghai was held as scheduled. We were in charge of publicity of the meetup, revisions of the invitation letters, arranging the details on the sequence of meetup through PowerPoints and most important of all, recording the all the key points each team made. Worldshaper-Shanghai was mainly in charge of writing reflections and reports over the meetup and communicated with those teams to ask for suggestions and feedbacks. We two teams helped each other go through difficulties and finally finish our online meet up.
During the meeting, each team presented its project in the form of PPT speech, and each team put forward valuable suggestions to each other. Finally, the judges gave valuable comments. There are six iGEM teams participating in this meeting: ASTWS-China,Worldshaper-Shanghai, Worldshaper-Nanjing, KEYSTONE, Peking, and XH-Chnia.

In addition, we have invited a VIP guest, iGEM Ambassador --Jianhan Hu (Jeff Hu). While Ambassador Hu put forward valuable suggestions for each team, he also held a risk&security workshop, which furthered our understanding on safety and risk requirements and regulations of the iGEM project.
For ASTWS-China, we also gained some inspirations for the implementation of our biofilms system and also realize some problems like the low efficiency of biodegradation system under room temperature, because of which, leading to some improvements of our own project.

Collaborate with QHFZ-China 

QHFZ-China held an international online meet up before us. Therefore, they shared some useful suggestions with us, such as how to record information and how to exchange information much more efficiently. Thanks for QHFZ-China, we avoid lots of undesired events that may happen. After finishing my team’s international online meet up, we also shared our experience with them, which would be beneficial to their second online meet up.

Technology exhibition together with ASTWS-China and Worldshaper-Nanjing

On the August 23th, we were pleased to accept the invitation to attend the opening ceremony of Hangzhou Science and technology week. During the opening ceremony, we got a chance to share our programs with citizens coming to watch the ceremony along with Worldshaper-Nanjing and Worldshaper-Shanghai. Before the exhibition, all three teams designed their own posters, roll-ups and brochures, and Worldshaper-Nanjing helped with the design and the printing work. And on the exhibition day, we helped other teams to set up all the banners and posters to get ready for the exhibition in the afternoon. Besides the presentation and introductory video, we also designed different games and snacks to attract kids and their parents to our exhibition. We designed a dart game, but instead of dart, we used sticky balls as the object to throw. The closer the ball sticks to the center, the higher point the kid will get, which means they use our E.coli design to degrade greater percent of plastic. In this way, children could have a better idea of what our project about. As for adults, our three teams worked together to present the iGEM competition and synthetic biology. After we introduced our program, we would also invite the adult to other team’s exhibition to listen to their presentation. Generally, this activity provided us an excellent opportunity to spread our projects to the public. During the spread process, all the teammates improved their communication and organizing ability. Moreover, through talking with citizens, many of whom are technology fan and professional technology works, we gained lot of advice about our design and background research. Those suggestions definitely helped us to perfect our program.

Partership with TJUSLS_China

It's the happiest thing for ASTWS-China to meet and cooperate with TJUSLS_China from Tianjin University this season.
In the project cooperation, TJUSLS_China and we have been discussing online actively. TJUSLS_China often provides constructive suggestions for our projects. In terms of experiments, TJUSLS_China reminds us of the low efficiency of the PETase system at room temperature, which leads to our further thinking and project improvement.
In the aspect of experimental improvement, we propose to combine the PETase produced by biofilm strengthening system with the high temperature resistance factor of TJUSLS_China, and try to increase its degradation efficiency under high temperature environment.
As for HP, TJUSLS_China kindly introduced the team they knew and the professors gave guidance to our project, and put forward many valuable suggestions in terms of online meet up and expert interview.
It is worth mentioning that our modeling work is attributed to the help of TJUSLS_China. The two teams discussed with each other during the modeling process. When the HPLC in our lab is broken, they guided us to measure the data and helped us to establish the Michaelis-Menten equation.
More details are on Partnership page.