Team:SJTU-software/Partnership
Overview
Our team conducted an in-depth collaboration with UESTC-Software in past years. We continued a close relationship with them this year. Due to the impact of Covid-19, though we were unable to communicate with them face to face, we adopted many alternative methods for communication.
Starting point
We have communicated with many teams at the initial design phase of the project. Though face-to-face communication was not possible, we managed to communicate with all teams online. We expressed our visions in the iGEM communicating group and wanted to share the project with others. We wanted to build a rice database to help researchers select the genes of interest more easily. We appreciated the ideas from many other teams, which gave us a lot of inspiration. Among all the teams, UESTC-Software showed great interest in our project and had in-depth exchanges with us. We found that there were many areas for cooperation between our two teams. In this way, we started our journey of collaboration.
Innovative forms of communication
Though we could not communicate face to face like before, it did not affect our communication. The truth was that we even had more time to communicate than before. We used our free time to host online meetings, exchange the latest developments, and give opinions on each other's projects. To be candid, this communication method was more flexible than before. We could make full use of our time and obtained effective information. Also, we sent one of our team member to UESTC as a representative, which made our relationship closer.
How do we collaborate
On June 27th, we held our first online meeting. We first introduced ourselves and were acquainted with each other. We put forward the idea of building a database such as rice pan-genome and introduced many other ideas, including molecular modeling, laboratory management tools, *etc*. However, UESTC suggested that we should focus on one subject. In return, we gave them useful suggestions for visualization after we understood their project.
Between June 27th and July 7th, our two teams were preparing the promotion tools for projects. We wanted to make a virtual simulation experiment, and what they wanted to make was a tool to help users understand protein structure. Our project was done through unreal, and their project was done through unity.
On July 8th, we conducted a second online meeting. Before this meeting, we had sent our self-made games to each other, hoping to receive some feedback. At the meeting, we put forward suggestions for improvement. Regarding their games, we thought the interface was a bit rudimentary, and we suggested that they should make some beautifications. They suggested that we should simplify some of the operating steps in virtual experiments because too many operating steps could easily make users feel bored.
From July 15th to July 25th, we held a summer camp with a synthetic biology theme at Huangchuan Middle School in Xining City, Qinghai Province. We made local students use our virtual laboratory. At the same time, we also showed the students games made by the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China. When using these two games, the students learned a lot of biological knowledge interestingly. To better improve our project, we sent these students questionnaires to collect their experience and suggestions on these two projects.
Our third online meeting took place on July 28th. Through this meeting, we introduced the results of our summer camp to UESTC-software. We shared the results of the collected survey with them. Besides, our two teams also had an in-depth discussion on algorithms. Both of our teams had realized the importance of establishing a database in the project, and we had also applied some algorithms such as cluster analysis to perform downstream analyses. In the beginning, all of us were not familiar with some parts of algorithms. After the communication, we understood algorithms and laid the foundation for the subsequent analyses.
To better cooperate with UESTC-software, we sent one of our team members, Junxi Mu, to their offline communication school. From August 6th to August 10th, Junxi Mu had full exchanges with students at UESTC on their campus. By experiencing each other's tools on the spot, we gave more specific suggestions. In terms of coding, Junxi Mu also communicated with them how to debug efficiently. Besides, Junxi Mu shared some of the difficulties and feelings our team encountered during the project.
In early September, we returned to our university. We often have face-to-face communication with another team in our school, SJTU-BioX-Shanghai. We asked the SJTU-BioX-Shanghai to comment on the UESTC-Software project from the perspective of experimenters. They believed that UESTC-Software's protein structure analysis project was beneficial for experimenters.
On September 22, we had a long online meeting. We thought about ways to better integrate our projects. We selected several representative genes in our rice gene database and found out the proteins they expressed. We gave these proteins to the UESTC-software team and asked them to analyze these proteins. They use the results of these analyses as part of their database. In addition to this online communication, they also invited us to watch their sign language video. After watching their video, we all think this work is very meaningful.
During the National Holidays from October 1st to October 8th, both teams devoted ourselves to the websites. We invited each other to browse websites and provided feedbacks every day. We always improved our web pages based on the suggestions made by the other team.
After October 10th, we were busy with Wiki. We shared many useful tools for website building. During the production of Wiki, both of us encountered many problems. Our two teams continuously found solutions for improvements to each other, some on aesthetics, and some on user experience.
