Team:HZAU-China/Partnership
Partnership
Overview
This year, we and SZPT-CHINA are both committed to oral health, and the same goal brought us together naturally. Since there is no direct competition between us, we both cooperate without any reservation. We have stayed close contact throughout the season. By sharing literature, exchanging ideas, and analyzing experimental results together, we facilitated the formation and success of each team's project.
You can also find our collaboration with SZPT-CHINA on their wiki: https://2020.igem.org/Team:SZPT-CHINA/Partnership
Details
June 22
In CCiC's QQ Communication Group, we found by chance that SZPT-CHINA's project has many similarities with ours. Solving Streptococcus mutans infection is the same part involved in our project, and we both plan to use the ComDE two-component system to detect S. mutans. This discovery made us very happy, because in the iGEM competition, there is no direct competition between us, so finding similar projects will not cause a tense competitive relationship between us, but will bring an opportunity to improve our project. This is the first contact with SZPT-CHINA.
July 6
On this day, we had a virtual meeting with SZPT-CHINA, in which we shared projects respectively, we explained our ultimate goal is repairing dental enamel, while SZPT-CHINA shared their ideas for treating S. mutans infection in the oral environment. In this exchange, The two teams put forward opinions on each other's projects.
July 16
In this daily contact, we communicated with SZPT-CHINA about the practical application methods of each project and discussed the target group of the projects. Using synthetic biology to solve real-world problems is one of the most important things we cared about when starting our project. To understand whom the two projects really serves, a questionnaire designed for general public is essential. We first discussed about the project of SZPT-CHINA, designed a dental caries questionnaire, and distributed the questionnaire on each other's social platform.
July 17
Today, the members of the two teams communicated with each other and designed a questionnaire about enamel together. Afterward, questionnaire was distributed on the social platforms of both teams. The result of the questionnaire gave us an idea of the target group of our project.
July 29
On this day, members of both teams chatted on QQ. SZPT mentioned that "the protein used in the suicide design is unable to be verified the expected function". After sufficient communication, we guessed that the sequence of the protein synthesized was incorrect, resulting in the invalid protein. SZPT-CHINA checked the sequence and found it is true that the sequence was incorrect.
August 6
We found that communication and discussion will greatly promote a project, so we planned to hold a communication meeting together after discussing with SZPT-CHINA, so that each team could get benefit from it.
During this period, we invited all the teams we had communicated with before. It was only by participating in iGEM that we had the opportunity to gather together. Therefore, we cherished the friends of each team we knew through the iGEM competition, so we named the exchange meeting Friend Team Meetup. After several days of preparation, we officially issued an invitation to the meeting through iGEM.
August 15
The exchange meeting officially started on this day. SZPT-CHINA and we were responsible for organizing and hosting the meeting. During the meeting, each team shared their own projects, which not only broadened our horizon but also made us realize our deficiencies.
August 16
Today we summarized the meeting's content. In the process of analyzing and summarizing, SZPT-CHINA team members found the chassis of microbes we planned to use in our project will do harm to the enamel, so they suggested that we change the chassis in our project. We accepted the suggestion from SZPT-CHINA, after consulting the literature, we decided to change the chassis to Escherichia coli Nissle 1917 in actual implementation.
September 19
In this stage, many team members who were responsible for wiki edit were programming, and they also encountered many problems in the construction of the web page. SZPT-CHINA and we conducted an exchange for wiki edit. In the previous web page writing, we found that the style of the official website always covered the style we set ourselves, and we tried many ways but failed to solve the problem. After the discussion, SZPT-CHINA suggested finding the style settings on the website and then resetting them. In addition, we also helped SZPT-CHINA solve the problem of "placing the code on the DW and then uploading it to iGEM with the rendering style error".
September 30
In order to promote the spread of synthetic biology, SZPT-CHINA held a conference on synthetic biology at their school and invited us to participate.
Thanks for this valuable opportunity to share our project and some thoughts on synthetic biology at Shenzhen Polytechnic.
October 15
Due to the impact of the COVID-19, we didn't start the experiment until September, so the experiment of many of our components had no progress. In the validation of the pNlm promoter, we had tried many experimental schemes, but there were no particularly significant results. We used the same biological part with SZPT-CHINA in detecting CSP, so we turned to SZPT-CHINA for help in the experimental scheme. SZPT-CHINA generously told us about their protocol, and we planned to conduct our own experiments based on that.
