Partnership

Partnership with Nanjing_NFLS

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- Design

Our partner team Nanjing_NFLS and us NFLS are both from Nanjing Foreign Language School, and the close collaboration between us naturally grows into partnership. After noticing the excessive amount of cellulose materials, such as waste paper and straw, in our life, we did some researches and exchanged ideas with Nanjing_NFLS when hunting for topics in school workshops.

We found that lignocellulosic biomass is the most abundant and promising renewable feed stock in the world. However, the pre-treatment of lignocelluloses and the byproducts are harmful to the environment. Nanjing_NFLS noticed the bottleneck of current MFCs, low electricity output. To improve the energy output, they tried to overexpress certain genes to enhance the electricity generation and transfer efficiency. We fell in love with the idea of Microbial Fuel Cells, which can degrade waste meanwhile produce energy. In future, our team’s project may combine with our partner’s.

-Collaboration

Hearing of our schoolmates from team Nanjing_NFLS are also participating in iGEM, and they are trying to improve the microbial fuel cells, which we also applied to our project, we decided to have regular discussions to make progress together. In the last semester, both of our teams have members who took part in the cell-engineering elective course. After class, we gathered together to discuss about our projects, such as what human practices we need to do and whether it is possible to mix those two kinds of genetically engineered bacteria in MFCs. Sometimes, we brought our questions to our elective course teacher.

Besides discussing after elective course, we also make a perfect use of iGEM club activities. When team CPU_China lectured about their project to iGEM club members, we decided to do educational activities for people of different ages. Also, we appreciated the hardware from CPU_China, so we asked for a permission to interview with their 3D printing club, who later gave an illuminative instruction to our hardwares.

-Educational activities

Biology is closely related to people’s daily life. However, in Chinese schools, biology is not treated as the main subject. Due to outdated textbook content, students failed to update knowledge of biology. Therefore, education towards students is of significant importance to the promotion of synthetic biology.

Our curriculum covers knowledge that are suitable for different age groups, from pupils to high school students. Since the savvy of students varies from each other, we two teams prepared different courses specifically facing each group.

Nanjing_NFLS offered presentations to elementary school and junior high. The courses for pupils were mainly illuminative, aiming to arouse their interest in biology, while the workshops for junior highs appeared to be relatively professional, hoping to prepare them for future biology courses and possibly iGEM competitions.

We presented workshops for senior highs. Our lectures and intriguing activities were more academic and served as strong supports to appeal to future iGEMers. We wish to prompt senior high students to care more about synthetic biology and become important parts of iGEM community.

-HP Interview with Prof. Yong

Consistent with what Prof.Yong mentioned to us, Nanjing_NFLS uses P. aeruginosa in the positive electrode of microbial fuel cell to turn ions of high valance into low-valance ions in waste water, which inspired us to introduce a hardware that is capable of dealing with waste water while boosting the efficiency of our established cellulose based microbial fuel cell system with P. aeruginosa in the future.

Our team inspires Nanjing_NFLS to introduce Fenton Reagent to cope with pollution (like phenolic compounds) come with the pretreatment of cellulose. They improved their project by modifying the cathode and provided us with another way to treat cellulose problems.

Visits to GenScript Biotech Corporation

In August, both teams attended Nanjing Regional meetup at GenScript Biotech Corporation, and Beijing International iGEMer Collaboration Seminar (online). We act efficiently, interpret our ideas of MFC improvements, and both learnt a lot from the cooperation between us and communication with other teams.

Later, we were inspired by their kill switch and designed an opaque MFC container to help both our team implement the kill switch (more specifically, a light switch). In the wetlab, we also helped Nanjing_NFLS with analysis of enzymatic activity, proof of plasmid construction by gel electrophoresis. Having known that we were struggling for improving website composition, they in return helped us in wiki art design.

Both of our team have huge influences towards the other along the procedure of preparing iGEM competition in terms of project design, project improvements and human practices. We have made progress together with Nanjing_NFLS through every discussion.