Team:BNU-China/Partnership
The ability of one team is limited, but if we can unite two teams, we will make a leap. This is an important spirit of synthetic biology. This year, we kept contacting with FAFU-China and helped each other throughout the season.
March - June
Brainstorming and communication
As soon as we set up our team, we have maintained close contact with each other. During the brainstorming process from March to June, we shared and exchanged our designs with each other to make progress together.
When sharing our project Automatic Barcode Creator with FAFU-CHINA, they showed great interest in our idea. And they introduced their project to us, which is aimed to produce ethanol by lignocellulose through biological fermentation. We both believed that, in the subsequent design, the two projects could be organically combined to achieve the effect of 1+1>2.
July
Co-education
Due to the pandemic, we both had great difficulties in conducting experiments, education and human practices. We shared our good ideas with each other in these aspects, such as online teaching, making science manual and so on. Then we put these ideas into practice and achieved good results.
Through our instructors, we participated in the co-education initiated by Tsinghua. We invited FAFU-CHINA to join us to make synthetic biology accessible to the general public together. We discussed a lot in how to lecture and how to make our education carried smoothly.
Figure 1.Co-education with FAFU-CHINA
August
Projects integration
In communication with FAFU-CHINA, we knew that the heterologous expression plasmid is easy to be lost in the continuous fermentation process, which will seriously affect the fermentation efficiency of their system. In order to solve this problem, they integrated the lignocellulose gene into the genome of yeast. However, both the stability of the integrated lignocellulose gene and the optimal utilization time were still unknown.
This inspired us a lot! Our project this year is based on CRISPR/Cas9 and DNA barcodes. Our system can automatically label each cell with different barcodes and obtain the lineage information together with transcriptomic information by single cell RNA sequencing. Although it is designed to be used in mammals, we desired to explore its application in microorganisms. Their project gave us inspiration! We can combine our system with their project to explore the stability of the integrated lignocellulose gene and the optimal utilization time in yeast.
We shared the idea with FAFU-CHINA, they thought it was meaningful! Combining two projects together can not only expand the meaning and application of our project, but also solve their problems and promote the process of their project.
Figure 2.Online meeting with FAFU-CHINA
We participated in the CCiC meeting together, and offered some advice on the videos and posters presented. They suggested that we use more vivid animations to introduce the project, and pointed out that the audio in our video was not clear enough. Thanks to their suggestions, we paid more attention to these problems in the final presentation video.
September
Further cooperation
Before entering the laboratory to carry out experiments, we exchanged views on laboratory safety and experimental arrangements with each other. More importantly, we combined two projects together in detail. We put forward that we can add our system into the plasmid they constructed. After single cell RNA sequencing, we obtain the lineage information together with transcriptomic information. By this way, we can understand the stability of the integrated lignocellulose gene and choose an optimal utilization time. This will provide guidance for the practical use of their project. Considering the limited time and the practical situation, we decided to validate our ABC system in yeast preliminarily.
The deadline for the Promotion Video was coming. We discussed about the style and content of promotion video, which made our videos more attractive.
October
To be continued
During the experiments, we always kept in close contact. We discussed about the design of their integrated fermentation system online. FAFU-CHINA raised some questions about whether the integrated fermentation system should be regulated by light or by chemical induction. We thought chemical inducement was far more effective than light control from the perspective of regulation effect.
We also shared our double promoter module with them. They thought this module had some similarities with their double plasmid system and advised us to validate it by experiments.
Throughout the whole competition, we regularly contacted with FAFU-CHINA. The long-term cooperation promoted the progress of our projects. By now, we had already built an ABC (Automatic Barcode Creator) system and set a fundamental paradigm in yeast. FAFU-CHINA had already constructed the double plasmid system in E.coli, and successfully observed a green fluorescent signal in DH5α. Both of us think the partnership between two teams is helpful and the combination of our projects has brighter prospects in synthetic biology.
Very grateful to our good partner FAFU-CHINA! Our friendship will last forever.
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Email：igem2020bnu_china@163.com
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