Team:CAU China/ScienceCommunication&Education /Meetings3





CCiC
    From August 27th to August 31st, we participated in the 7th Conference of China iGEMer Community (CCiC). Affected by COVID-19, CCiC changed the form of previous offline activities and adopted a new online conference. CCiC is an important platform for the communication, cooperation, demonstration and learning of the participating teams of iGEM in China. This year’s theme is "From LAB to FAB" to encourage participating teams and more synthetic biology Scientific research talents make more efforts and thinking for the higher quality and more efficient transformation of laboratory scientific research and technological achievements into productivity in the actual production process. This event lasted for five days and continued the style of previous sessions. It was divided into five parts: presentation display, poster display, lecture, workshop, and highly acclaimed panel session, which were carried out on two network platforms, zoom and Feishu. There are more than 70 teams and many experts in Synthetic Biology participate in this event. We are very honored to be able to participate in this event. During the exchange process, we fully demonstrated our project and introduced our project Abaddon Remedy in detail to other teams and professionals, which is using RNA interference to transform yeast and upgrade Metarhizium anisopliae to achieve a way of killing locusts more convenient, efficient and at lower cost.

    In this event, experts from the sponsor of CCiC put forward valuable suggestions to our project, which also promoted us to think about our project more deeply.

1. Among the several RNA delivery programs proposed by the team, such as injection and feeding, it should be clear whether to adopt complementary advantages or choose a more advantageous method, and the reasons for the choice should be reflected.

    We have fully considered this problem and designed a pre-experiment for locust feeding to analyze and judge whether the feeding method is effective (details can be seen in the experimental design). Locusts that successfully put RNA-containing yeast into the body.

2. The team's application of the method of yeast delivery of shRNA is based on the previous application on fruit flies. Is it equally effective in locusts? Can the shRNA in yeast be effectively secreted and enter the locust target cells? Are the different shRNAs for different developmental stages of locusts automatically regulated or artificially adjusted? Does yeast dry powder damage shRNA? Can you consider producing shRNA in large quantities when the yeast is released? According to the genes targeted by shRNA, is it possible to affect other insects and cause ecological damage?

    In response to the above-mentioned related issues, when selecting target genes, we fully collected data and screened genes that are specific to locusts and play an important role in their growth process as target genes. In the experiment, we first designed an injection experiment of dsRNA expressed in vitro of the target gene, and injected the transcribed dsRNA into the locusts to verify whether the sequence we designed can kill the locusts;

    In addition, experts from the sponsor of CCiC expressed support for our design of using dry yeast preparations, and believed that the perspective of dry yeast preparations was practical.


iGEM Southern China Regional Meeting
    In order to communicate with other teams and get inspiration to improve our project, CAU_China participated the iGEM Southern China Regional Meeting, held by SZU-China. The meeting is held online. We listened to the presentation of other teams and uploaded our own project video. We learned a lot from their wonderful idea. 2020 iGEM Asian Ambassador Dorothy, Teacher Haoqian Zhang and Fankang Meng from Bluepha Co.Ltd. were invited as special guests. In the meetup, they shared us with unique insights into Human Practice and team-building, which benefited us a lot.


iGEM Beijing Regional Meeting
    Inspiration:

    Because of the Covid-19 and Beijing's special status as the capital, the iGEM teams in Beijing became the latest teams to return to the laboratory. Due to this special situation, we thought that the teams in Beijing needed a meeting to exchange their experimental progress and countermeasures for not being able to return to the laboratory. So CAU-China held the iGEM Beijing Regional Meeting online through ZOOM, aiming to establish connections between teams in Beijing.

    The meeting

    After the invitation letter was issued, we received registration from many teams. Finally, 8 teams presented their projects, including BNU-China, BIT, BUCT, CAU_China, Peking, Tsinghua, Tsinghua-A, USAS-China.



        

    We also invited 2019 iGEM Asian Ambassador Dorothy as our special guest. After the meeting, we received many positive feedback from many teams.