Team:BNDS China/Acknowledgement
During iGEM 2020, we received lots of help from others, including individuals and organizations. We sincerely thank everyone who supported us during the great journey in iGEM 2020. As for acknowledgement, we documented contributions from people or organization that helped us.
Figure 1. A photograph of Ms. Hu. This picture was taken during the interview.
Ms. Hu (Figure 1) was the manager of 798 bar. When we were trying to produce bacteria cellulose, we wanted to use waste beer yeast as a cheaper material for culture media. Therefore, hoping to gain a more concrete view of the waste beer yeast, we interviewed Ms. Hu about the production of beer residue during fermentation. Moreover, we also learned the current situation regarding the waste treatment process of waste beer yeast from her statement. As a result, we planned to obtain some sample of waster beer yeast in order to apply it to our G. xylinus fermentation, providing an innovative scheme for the waste treatment of beer dregs. See more details in our HP website.
Figure 2. A photograph of Mr. Gong. This picture was taken during the interview.
Mr. Gong (Figure 2) is a master in ancient paper making technology. Considering that the shaping process of our bacterial cellulose is similar to the technology in papermaking industry, we interviewed Mr. Gong in order to learn papermaking process in a more detailed way and use those technologies to reshape our bacterial cellulose. During the interview, Mr. Gong firstly introduced an overview of papermaking, and then emphasized some points for attention in the paper reshaping process, which is very helpful for our iGEM 2020 project. See more details in our HP website.
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iGEM Revive & Restore Committee
Our project, to manufacture artificial leather from the combination of cellulose and protein crosslinking, has the aim of protecting wild animals from being killed for their leather. Since our project accords with the concept of conservation suggested by iGEM Revive & Restore Committee, we applied for the Revive & Restore sponsorship in May. Finally, we were selected to receive a Revive & Restore iGEM 2020 grant, so we managed to gain the $5500 sponsorship (Figure 3). We felt grateful towards the support from iGEM Revive & Restore Committee.
Figure 3. The letter of announcement from iGEM Revive & Restore.
This picture is the announcement letter delivered by iGEM 2020 Revive & Restore Committee. -
New England Biolabs (NEB)
Figure 4. Delivery of sponsorship from NEB.
Top, the photograph shows the package opening as soon as we received the delivery. Bottom, this is the support list of all reagent sponsored by NEB. Price was converted into RMB.Considering that the price of experiment reagent like enzymes might not be affordable for our high school students, we asked NEB for sponsorship about life science laboratory supply. Fortunately, NEB approved our request for sponsorship and supported us by delivering reagents (Figure 4), particularly for molecular cloning, which helped us a lot in the experiment part.
As two softwares, Snapgene and Geneious Prime are well-known in iGEM community for a long time because they are really two powerful tools for designing plasmids, importing sequence, performing molecular cloning, and so on. Therefore, almost every iGEMer had used these two applications during the iGEM career.
Considering that we need to design our experiment and analyze experiment result in a convenient way, we asked Snapgene and Geneious Prime for sponsorship in November 2019 and June 2020. Our request was quickly approved (Figure 5). In details, Snapgene and Geneious Prime sponsored their free licenses to our team so that we can design our experiment efficiently. Each member in our team learned how we could use these two applications to simulate experiment before conduction and make judgment regarding experiment result.
Figure 5. Email from Snapgene (left) and Geneious (right) about our request for sponsorship.
IDT and Twist Bioscience provide each iGEM team in 2020 with 20kb and 10kb free gene fragment synthesis, respectively. They helped us to synthesize the DNA constructs wanted.
