Throughout the season, we collaborated with the SCUT_China on several bilateral issues. In the field of HP, we invited Professor Yigang Tong to join our video conference and exchanged our ideas on the applications of phage in drug-resistant bacterial infection treatment. We have acknowledged that phage therapy is very conservative yet with great potential in the current application, which really came to our aid regarding the project.
We considered all the difficulties that phage therapy may face from experimental design to practical application in our proposed implementation, and exchanged views with their team. We sincerely hope that these joint efforts can help the future iGEMers.
Team SCUT_China built a complicated model of bacterial growth and introduced a delaying factor in apoptosis. In order to obtain enough data to verify the correctness of the model, the wet experiment group members of SCUT_China conducted an extremely difficult experiment. Therefore, the dry experiment group failed to communicate with the members of the wet experiment group timely and effectively, while the members of the dry experimental group were not biology majors. We gave their modeling team some insight into the biological meaning of the variables in the equation and communicated the feasibility analysis of the mathematical model.
Simultaneously, we also helped them verify the correctness of the fitting results. In this process, we found that the fitting results of the model were very unstable, which was a false case. After repeatedly checking their experimental protocol, two problems were found: first, their bacterial count was based on the absorbance value determined by Lambert Bear law, but they did not subtract the fixed error caused by the culture dish and culture medium, which resulted in a fitting error of at least 6%; Secondly, they used the wrong units in fitting the growth rate of bacteria with logistic method, which made the calculation of the growth rate and death rate of bacteria wrong.
Sincerely thanks for all friends again and we will continue to communicate with each other after the iGEM competition and work together for the development of synthetic biology.
2 The Conference of China iGEMer Community
The Conference of China iGEMer Community (CCiC) is a platform for the iGEMers in China to communicate with and learn from each and demonstrate their achievements. The 7th CCiC was an online seminar lasting for 5 days (2020.8.27-31). In this year, the offline team presentation was replaced by a video presentation on the Zoom app. Our presentation section was scheduled on the 31st of August. After our video played, there were 5 minutes for judging and questioning by the professors and the audiences.
CCiC experts give suggestions on the entry point and specific methods sides of experimental modeling: there are two main modeling directions of electroporation: simulation model or machine learning. However, machine learning is not suitable for the lack of big data support, and the results are not convincing. This makes it clear that we use the model to simulate the electric rotation. There were five other teams interact with us through Zoom, we could watch others’ video and ask them question. We learnt something new from this others’ presentation and also found the way of making an excellent presentation video. In the later poster demonstration section, we had a chance to present our project to the professors and the audiences again. They pointed out the weakness of our poster, for example they said that the font size of our poster was quite small to see and the diagram of the process can be clearer. From all these advices, we can improve ourselves. In conclusion, it was a great chance for our team to learn from and communicate with the other iGEMers. From this seminar, we confirmed that our project was on the right track, but still got rooms for improvement. We can also be well-prepared for the Great Jamboree with a more attractive and clearer video and poster.
3 ABC: Anti-Biofilm Community
We joined Anti-Biofilm Community founded by six like-minded teams (SZU_China, HK_HCY, SUSTech_Shenzhen, Tsinghua, UM_Macau and WHU-China). We have conducted in-depth communication with other teams online. We have made a manual for project introduction and scientific exchange content acquisition together with our community, and learned a lot from their projects, which greatly promoted the development of our project.
Here are our 2 handbooks documents. (English version & Chinese version)
