Team formation & member training
2019.11.10
After the 2019 iGEM Giant Jamboree, several students from 2019 SCU-China held the first group meeting to discuss the 2020 iGEM team building. Among them, Wang Mingyao (current 2020 SCU-WestChina team leader) proposed to establish a new team based on the State Key Laboratory of Biotherapy to focus on precision medicine. Jin Qihan (current 2020 SCU-China team leader) still hopes to inherit the good tradition and academic resources of SCU-China and continue to build a team at the College of Life Sciences at Sichuan University. So this year they study synthetic biology based on microbial expression system. After the consultation, the two decided to establish teams separately and keep cooperating in enrollment, project design, experiments, and human practice.
2019.11.21
2020 SCU-China cooperated with 2020 SCU-WestChina for enrollment work and recruited a total of 52 new students. Among them, SCU-China contains 37 students interested in biology and SCU-WestChina includes 15 students with particular interest in the medical treatment.
Fig 1. Enrollment work
2019.12.1
The first group meeting held by the two teams was held at the Wangjiang campus of Sichuan University. The two team leaders addressed speeches to introduce synthetic biology, to mobilize enthusiasm, and to share the regulations and award criteria of this year’s composition. The subsequent dinner between the two teams deepened the relationship between team members.
Fig 2. Group meeting
2019.12.13
The State Key Laboratory of Biotherapy held the SKLB Academic Symposium in Dec 13th,2019, both team attended the meeting. At the meeting, team SCU-WestChina presented their preliminary drug design and received positive evaluations from Professor Chen-Chong and Professor Wang-Yuan. Professor Chen Chong agreed with the design strategy to replace small molecule drugs with humanized recombinant proteins in order to reduce side effects. Professor Wang-Yuan confirmed the feasibility of using elements that have been proved safe and functional by previous animal and clinic studies. After the meeting, the two teams discussed and reflected on the professor's suggestions and comments.
2020.1.12-2020.1.20
SCU-China organized the 2020 iGEM winter training under support of the iGEM Association of Sichuan University. Some students from SCU-WestChina participated. The two teams trained experimental skills and dicussed their respective protocols. What’ more, during training, every member made great progress by frequent brainstorming, discussing and literature reading.
Fig 3-4. 2020 iGEM winter training
2020.1.21
SCU-China and SCU-WestChina presented their preliminary project design at a seminar held on Wangjiang campus. Instructors and several professors from the College of Life Sciences at Sichuan University attended. They commented on the project design and made valuable suggestions. After discussion, the two teams finally decided on their final topics, namely RNAlphABA and Lung Knight.
Fig 5. Final topic discussion
2020.2.18
Affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, the returning date for team members delayed. The two Leaders held an online meeting to discuss the plan for training, experiments, and human practice of the new semester. The two leaders believed that the two teams have similar goals and tasks in future work. At the same time, the previous cooperation has achieved good results. Members can learn from each other's strengths, and thus both teams improve efficiency. So they decided to continue cooperation. In order to make team members better trained, they decided to hold an online meeting on March 16th and present relevant literature every Sunday, which promotes team members’ understanding of iGEM competition and synthetic biology knowledge.
2020.3.22
The first online topic sharing meeting of the two teams was held. The members of the two teams discussed the topics of NCKU_Tainan, Greatbay_SZ, and Calgary in 2019, and learned from the design of the experimental verification and HP of excellent teams. Since the first meeting achieved a good result, it was decided as a regular meeting, held once a week. Totally, the topic sharing meeting was held 8 times this semester.
Fig 6. Online meeting
2020.6.7
The leaders of two teams held the last meeting before experiments and exchanged their experimental designs and arrangements. After discussion, they felt it feasible to cooperate in the experimental part, including RT-qPCR, HPLC, SDS-PAGE, western blot, and so on. In addition, Professor Zhang Nianhui and Professor Xie Huiqi have been following up on the subject and constantly making suggestions and instructions, which are of great help.
Fig 7-8. Presentations of both Teams
Two professors’ suggestions to SCU-China: Eukaryotic protein expression efficiency is not as good as E. coli and other prokaryotes, so you may encounter problems in protein verification; It is recommended to use Western Blot to verify instead of fluorescence imaging. The two professors’ suggestions to SCU-WestChina: From protein design to protein prokaryotic synthesis, you may encounter the problem of low fermentation efficiency and low yield, which may lead to difficulties in rapid anti-fibrosis screen in vitro. The cell-free expression may be a good choice. It’s a good strategy to use the cell-free expression to synthesize a small amount of protein and verify in cells. Then using prokaryotic expression to achieve large-scale protein yields for future analysis.
2020.7.11
Professor Zhang Nianhui organized a meeting and guided the two leaders on how to manage a team. What’s more, he shared experiences and lessons learned from past competitions. The two team leaders also asked some questions about task allocation.
2020.7.22
SCU-China, SCU-WestChina, and SZU-China team members held an experience sharing session. The three teams introduced their own topics and project progress and put forward opinions and suggestions on other's topics. In addition, the three teams also exchanged experience in team building and project design, which laid the foundation for next year’s competition.
Fig 9-11. Experience sharing session with SZU-China
Recommendations received by SCU-China:
1. Too many genes are included, which makes it difficult to integrated into one expression vector. It is better to consider polycistronic expression in order to reduce the number of foreign genes introduced.
2. Microbiological safety issues: It is recommended to fully consider the suicide effect, and start suicide under pre-tested synthetic concentration of ABA.
3. Concentration detection: techniques can be developed through color reaction or corresponding devices to let know the concentration of ABA or PA.
4. Dough: It is necessary to consider problems of genetic mutation and strain degradation, and how to ensure the stable inheritance of the genetic material of yeast in the dough.
Recommendations received by SCU-WestChina:
1. Too many genes are included, which makes it difficult to integrated into one expression vector. It is better to consider polycistronic expression in order to reduce the number of foreign genes introduced.
2. Microbiological safety issues: It is recommended to fully consider the suicide effect, and start suicide under pre-tested synthetic concentration of ABA.
3. Concentration detection: techniques can be developed through color reaction or corresponding devices to let know the concentration of ABA or PA.
4. Dough: It is necessary to consider problems of genetic mutation and strain degradation, and how to ensure the stable inheritance of the genetic material of yeast in the dough.
2020.8.20
The two teams were invited by Nanjing Pharmaceutical University (CPU) and GenScript to attend the first NCiC exchange meeting in Nanjing, where they discussed topics, shared knowledge, and exchanged experience with teams of Peking University and NJU. At the same time, the professors and researchers from Nanjing Pharmaceutical University and GenScript also put forward some suggestions for each team's topic.
Fig 12-14. NCiC
Recommendations received by SCU-China:
1. Whether a way can be found to increase FPP（upstream product of ABA）production and whether some other flow of FPP can be inhibited by other means, which is able to result in higher production for engineered yeast.
2. The use of csy4 is redundant when there is already a 2A sequence.
3. The use of multiple 2A sequences may result in reduced expression of the next cistron, so it is generally the best to use only one 2A sequence.
4. The use of engineered yeast in farmers may not meet the requirements for gene safety.
Recommendations received by SCU-WestChina:
1. HP: It is necessary to further investigate the needs of patients, conduct cost analysis of existing drugs, and communicate more deeply with relevant pharmaceutical companies.
2. Modeling: consider the construction of physical models for further fitting analysis of the drug inhalation.
2020.9.28
The experiment of the two teams came to an end, and the team leaders held a meeting to discuss the problems they encountered and provided some help to each other. SCU-WestChina's assistance to SCU-China: Provide the RT-qPCR protocol, on-site guidance for experimental operations such as RNA extraction, and some I-TASSER accounts to help with protein structure prediction.
Fig 15. Discussion of experimental problems
2020.10.20
During the last meeting, we discussed issues concerning the deadline of wiki, video, and judging form submission. We completed the partnership part of wiki and finished writing the judging form.
Fig 18. NCiC meeting
Fig 19-20. Taking pictures of each other
Fig 21. Our PPT