Team:SYSU-CHINA/Partnership

Overview

We know from the very beginning that cooperation is the basis for higher achievements, so we decided to find a partner team who can cooperate at a deeper level. Fortunately, we found them in CCiC(Conference of China iGEMer Community)！ This year, we have established a long-term and in-depth communication relationship with our new friend SJTU-Biox Shanghai team based on our common focused research on directed evolution.

Due to the epidemic this year, the experimental module cannot be performed normally, but it does not hinder our cooperation in model, education, and algorithms.

Model

In the modeling part,we not only discussed the model construction of the two teams in detail, but also provided sincere suggestions and important help for each other's project model design details. SJTU-BioX-Shanghai believes that our modeling ideas are quite clear, but when verifying the relationship between dsRNA affinity and cytotoxicity, the model cannot be fitted due to lack of experimental data, and the function of this model should include estimating the appropriate concentration of IFN and Dox. This will require sufficient affinity and cell viability data. Based on this suggestion, we improved our modeling program and benefited a lot.

Figure 1. Our online meeting

Algorithm

In terms of algorithms, we have had many in-depth exchanges and benefited a lot from each other. We propose an improvement plan for the data set division method of the algorithm part of SJTU-BioX-Shanghai, which avoids the corresponding loss of negative samples from being dominant, which affects the judgment of the machine learning model, while SJTU-BioX-Shanghai analyzes the RNA sequence for us. The regression model used by affinity proposes an improvement plan, which improves the final accuracy of our algorithm by 5%.

Figure 2. Deep discussion in algorithm

Education Together

In the education part, through discussions, we plan to jointly organize popular science education with the theme of directed evolution. In the early stage, we discussed the appropriate time together, collected relevant information, produced PPT and wrote speeches.We carried out activities in the form of online conferences in Guangdong and Shanghai respectively. The students showed strong welcome to our lectures and developed a strong curiosity about iGEM and directed evolution.

Figure 3. A speech on directed-evolution

Although due to the epidemic, we both have many plans and cooperation that cannot be carried out normally. However, no matter what setbacks we encounter, we will accompany each other. After this long-term and comprehensive cooperation, we have established deeper friendship. Our relationship has far exceeded the scope of partners, and is more like a group of like-minded friends!