Partnership

Overview

There is an old Chinese saying that "you see the truth in adversity", which means that the best friends are the friends who can support the hard times together. In such a year when all plans were disrupted by the epidemic, we were fortunate to get to know the SYSU-CHINA team and formed a close partnership with them. Our projects this year are focused on directed evolution and hope to solve practical problems. In the process of project advancement, we helped each other and moved forward together, also we discussed a series of issues related to directed evolution.

Our discussion and cooperation not only enhanced the relationship between us, but also gave both of us new insights and improvements of the project. In general, our cooperation is mainly in modeling, public education, part upload and wiki production.

Model

From the beginning of August, we started to get to know and contacted the SYSU-CHINA team. Since they did not obtain permission to enter the laboratory at the beginning, and we only started the preliminary construction experiment, we chose to discuss our projects from the modeling aspect.

Due to distance limitations, our communication is mainly concentrated on the online meeting room platform. After many exchanges, we put forward insightful suggestions on each other's model, and also resolved some of our questions in the process of model debugging during the joint discussion.

SYSU-CHINA to Us

Friends from the SYSU-CHINA team have proposed to our machine learning model that we can further increase the size of the training set. At the same time, they suggested that we use regularization in the training process to replace the need for more positive samples through calculation conclusions, thereby improving the fitting effect.

In addition, they also raised some questions and doubts about our molecular dynamics model (protein residue substitution model), and expressed their expectation of our experimental results.

We to SYSU-CHINA

In return, we also analyzed and evaluated their RNA structure and gave a series of recommendations. In order to make it easier for SYSU-CHINA students to understand what we mean, we have summarized and sorted out specific suggestions for the different models they designed. Our suggestions mainly focus on the gene circuit model and neural network prediction model designed by SYSU-CHINA.

Public Education

In addition to model discussions, we also jointly organized public education lectures and exchange meetings. Based on our common subject directed evolution, we chose to introduce our projects around directed evolution technology. At the same time, by introducing the technological development, derivative technology and results of directed evolution, the concept of synthetic biology is further introduced to the public, and the fledgling high school students can further expand their horizons and contact the frontiers of scientific research.

We prepared the content of the lecture together and sent out our invitation to the two schools. During the exchange, we also provided guidance and assistance to the team of Guangdong Experimental Middle School.

Details can be found in our Collaborations page and Public Education page.

Others

iGEM is the beginning of our story, but it will not be the end. In addition to helping each other to advance the project, we often greet each other about the preparations for the game and the daily life of the team. During the preparation of the wiki, all nights were long and suffering.

But because of the mutual company of the team members and the spiritual support of the partnership in the distance, the long night is full of hope.