Under the impact of the COVID-19, teams all over the world have encountered many problems, yet as iGEM emphasizes the win-win cooperation between the teams, especially in this special circumstances, the teams should strengthen cooperation to overcome difficulties together.
As a result to the matter, team Bit-China have put our effort to promote our relationship with team Bit for further communications.
We had an cooperation in consider of our human practice. Because this year iGEM launched the "Two phase" competition mode. Although a team can have different composition in the two years of the "Two phase", it will be even more important if the team members who participated in the project in the first year can continue to participate in the second year. It is possible to make a better project. Therefore, the team's heritage has become very important. Team BIT-China interviewed a number of iGEM teams in 2019, designed a series of questions on "team heritage" and received a lot of answers. In the survey conducted by BIT-China last year, it was found that many iGEMers have gained a lot from iGEM, and many people also expressed their willingness to participate in the future iGEM. But in fact, few iGEMers really stayed in the team and participated in the next year's project. In the results, many iGEMers mentioned that their team did not have a corresponding incentive mechanism, and there was no motivation to keep them. This question is of great interest to team BIT. Therefore, tean BIT got in touch with team BIT-China this year, hoping to cooperate in this regard.
Therefore, we want to understand why iGEMers are willing to participate in iGEM.
According to the results of the questionnaire, most iGEMers believe that iGEM is a training for future research work and an excellent opportunity to communicate with more teams. At the same time, most iGEMers don't think it is important to get an award through iGEM for higher education.
Similarly, when asking most iGEMers what they think is the most valuable content they have obtained in iGEM, most iGEMers also think so.Most iGEMers believe that participating in iGEM to train their scientific research capabilities is vital to them.
Through this questionnaire survey, combined with the results of the BIT_China team in 2019, we believe that if we can establish a "course to iGEM" and "student to teacher" system, it may be possible to increase the team members to participate in another year The passion of iGEM.
Through such research results, team BIT and team BIT-China reached a consensus, hoping to conduct in-depth cooperation in personnel training, help the two teams work better this year, and lay the foundation for the second year of work. For this purpose, team BIT and team BIT-China have carried out a series of related cooperation work at different stages of the project.
In the early stage of the project, how to make the new team members better understand iGEM so as to better promote the project, BIT and BIT-China jointly organized a series of related courses to train the team members together.
Therefore, during our online process, we prioritize the learning needs of our team members and the students' course expertise. The BIT team combines online learning to be members of the team, students from the college, and students from the entire school. A series of courses combined with professional courses have been prepared to help students learn more professional knowledge from their own knowledge background, and also be able to understand iGEM and synthetic biology in the process. Similarly, these courses were taught by iGEMers from the past team BIT. At the same time, we also held trial lectures in the team members after class to help the team members better understand the content of the course, and at the same time exercise their ability to explain relevant content for new team members in the future. Similarly, we shared these contents on the bilibili platform to help more students learn and understand related aspects.
In the middle of the project, both teams participated in CCIC. Before the game, BIT and BIT-China conducted project exchanges to prepare for this meeting. Team BIT put forward some suggestions for the poster of BIT-China from the perspective of the artist, and helped the BIT-China team to better modify its poster, and finally won the best poster award in CCIC.
After CCIC, BIT received suggestions from the judge and many other teams. These suggestions were basically focused on the hardware part. Many people think that there is a problem with the related manual centrifugal device. Team BIT-China helps BIT to troubleshoot related issues. BIT adopted the relevant suggestions provided by BIT-China and finally decided to use the fingertip top as the new manual centrifugal device.
Not only that, the BIT team and the BIT-China team are also working together to attract students from different backgrounds to become iGEMers and to reserve talents for the future. In order to help more freshmen understand the university, understand the research work, and understand the iGEM, BIT and BIT-China jointly held a coffee metting. Because of the impact of the COVID-19, it is irresponsible to hold large-scale lectures, so the two teams chose Use the form of holding several coffee metting to achieve the effect of popular science publicity.
Team BIT-China and team BIT started in-depth cooperation in talent training this year. The two teams will sum up their experience this year and cultivate more professional iGEMers in the iGEM process next year, and make better results!
Both of NWU-China-B and our team focus on the metabolic pathway of flavonoids, so it is easier for our two teams to exchange project design.
On August 15 this year, we participated in an exchange meeting held by Shenzhen University. After learning about their project, we found that we are all based on the metabolic pathway of flavonoids, which is worthy of a deep communication.
The project of NWU-China-B back then was to introduce the modular plasmids into E.coli to synthesize a large amount of astragaloside with low-cost substrate glucose, and combine with E.coli (from West China) which synthesized linalool After co culture, astragaloside and linalool were purified and mixed to produce antibacterial deodorant.And our project focused on the modular design to change the co culture mode of the two bacteria, so as to improve the effect of completing the flavonoid metabolism pathway in the mixed bacteria system.
So we raised some of the concerns of ours related to the matter:
1. Flavonoid substances are generally only pharmacological, not a very strong affect.
2. Why the antibacterial activity of astragaloside is irreplaceable?
3. If more plasmids are introduced into E.coli, plasmid overload may occur, and the final product may not be synthesized. And it can't detect which step of protein expression is wrong.
4. Co-culture is the production of one substance by two bacteria, and it is not easy to find suitable culture conditions. If the product can be mixed, there is no need for complex co culture design.
5. Affected by the epidemic situation this year, it is not required to do experiments, and it is not recommended to insist on pursuing high yield.
We also explain to them what is a substance that is worth synthesizing:
Anthocyanins have been produced by some people, but the yield is low, so we can synthesize high yield anthocyanin derivatives - pyroanthocyanins. When doing background research, you need to find the most difficult part to synthesize substances, and transformed it through glycosylation, hydroxylation or acylation, in order to enhance some characteristics of the raw material.
We raised the idea that they may can redesign the purpose of the project, and provided them with several ideas for project improvement:
1. Orthopedic plants
2. Glycosylation modification of kaempferol: kaempferol is an important drug precursor. Because it is insoluble in water and difficult to extract, kaempferol can not be widely synthesized. Therefore, we can synthesize and extract kaempferol by glycosylation to produce 3-o-glucose kaempferol.
Later, they found that kaempferol in the flavonoid metabolism pathway had good anti-inflammatory and antiviral activities, which played an important role in the anti-inflammatory and antiviral activities of traditional Chinese medicine against Xinguan epidemic this year. However, the water solubility of kaempferol was not good, which restricted the wider application of the drug. Therefore, they changed the project to focus on the construction of an appropriate enzymatic reaction system in vitro by expressing two UDP glycosyltransferases to improve its water solubility and retain its anti-inflammatory activity.
We had an in-depth discussion with the NWU-CHINA-B team in terms of designing. The projects of the two teams are very similar, both of which are co cultured to synthesize fine chemicals. Yet in order to composite the loss for our late cooperation, after getting in touch at the friend team meet-up, we exchanged views on the design of flavonoid metabolic pathway.
We have made a lot of comments on NWU-CHINA-B, and we have also gained a lot of opinions.
1. The co culture conditions of eukaryotic cells and prokaryotic cells need special design to make the growth rate meet certain requirements.
2. We found the application of hydroxylase in the design of nwu-china-b, and we constructed the pathway for the synthesis and metabolism of sacranol.
All in all, we proposed some of our ideas to them and hopefully that it will provide some kind of help to them.