Team:Hainan China/Partnership

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Partnership with iGEM Team St. Andrews

iGEM Team St. Andrews is formed by the undergraduate students from University of St. Andrews, the United Kingdom.

Team St. Andrews have a research topic as ours: how to slow down coral bleaching. Difference is that we tried to achieve this goal through providing essential nutrients to symbiont Zooxanthellae, while St. Andrews sought to investigate the components of sun cream.

We initiated the partnership with St. Andrews by email to explain our project design and expressed our willingness to form a collaboration with them. Fortunately, Team St. Andrews quickly responded and agreed.

We then held our first telecommunication with them and discussed the two projects between us through five aspects:

1) They planned to do a survey on the effect of sunscreen for the protection of corals,to see how much knowledge public has. They promised to share the questionnaires and survey results with us. We offered to distribute their survey in China among different age groups locally, shared the data between two teams.

2) They asked if we could perform some wet-lab experiments since their lab was not functioning due to coronavirus pandemic. We promised to share our results of the nutrient experiments with them so that they could use some of our results and consider to add some nutrients based on our conclusion into their sun scream formula.

3) St. Andrews suggested that we could use some mathematical modeling to quantitatively simulate coral bleaching. They said that they could certainly help with modeling and we could give them more detailed information for their consideration.

4) As we planned to share our ideas and data between the two iGEM teams, they suggested to use digital photography to store and retrieve the coral bleaching data quantitatively and provided a possible protocol for us.
( https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022098116300387 )

Since then, we kept in close contact with St. Andrews to share information that we believed they might be interested in. We have helped to recruit more participants to the survey in China and even in other countries. We have held several online discussions with St. Andrews about coral bleaching and our potential solutions. The discussions were beneficial to both teams in terms of project progress and consideration of wider collaborations with other teams addressing the same issue.

In August we entered the lab in Hainan university and in a better position to discuss about experiments, we held a meeting again with St. Andrews. We presented our experimental design and results. St. Andrews decided to add different concentrations of different chemicals to Zooxanthellae to determine the coral bleaching state. Hence, we agreed to run their experiment in our lab to provide them the data. St. Andrews provided a wet lab protocol of their experiments for our use. St. Andrews’ formula included mineral oil, vegetable oil, and aloe vera el which we have found in Hainan:

1) Product Name:Liquid paraffin

CAS:8042-47-5

Purity:99% Package:100G;1.2USD|900G;1USD

——mineral oil

2) Product Name:BROMINATED VEGETABLE OIL

CAS:8016-94-2

Purity:99% Package:100g,500g,1kg,5kg,10kg

——vegetable oil

3) Product Name: ALOE VERA GEL

CAS:714950-07-9

Remarks:Purity: 0.99 | Package: 25KG;5KG;1KG;500G

——Aloe vera gel

Then, we run the experiments in our lab in the same time with our own experiments.

We obtain the results and send the results to Team St. Andrews. Here is a brief summary of the results:

St. Andrews integrated our results with theirs to draw certain positive conclusions that there was no negative effect observed in any of the samples and the substances tested were not suspected to be toxic to corals. Further research was needed to confirm the safety of these three chemicals.

On 28^th of August, St. Andrews held an online forum (topic: can GMO shape future’s humanity?) and invited our team to join the forum. This forum was mainly a panel discussion between five experts from different fields and a Q&A part. We joined the forum and learnt a lot about the relationship between GMO and modern society.