Team:Worldshaper-Wuhan/Collaborations
HZAU-China
Virtual Meetup
NJU-China
public activities
Collaboration
This year, our team extensively cooperated with other iGEM teams to have better preparation for the competition. We worked with NJU-China, HZAU-China, Worldshaper-Shanghai, Worldshaper-Nanjing and ASTWS-China, etc. Regular communication, in-depth mentorship and public events cooperation with these teams allowed us to obtain a better understanding of each team’s project, and ultimately enhance our performance, especially relate in modeling and wiki building, on our own project.
Collaboration with HZAU-China as a mentorship
Our first step to establish a cooperative relationship with HZAU-Chinais hosting a virtual project meetup. At this meeting, we prepared slides about our project and obstacles we have. Members of two teams took turns to introduce project to each other. Based on their questions and advise, we organized a systematic improvement plan for our project. We also exchanged our ideas for Science Communication. Finally, combining our weaknesses and their strengths, we decided that they could be our mentors on modeling. As college students major in Mathematics, they are professional talents who can assist us in this aspect. We are delighted to establish a cooperation with the HZAU-China team.
Fig.1 mentorship with HZAU-China
Throughout the iGEM competition season, we learned mathematical modeling from HZAU-China. We often showed our models to them and asked them if they could give us some advice. Our questions started with easy ones and gradually became more specific as our capacity in modeling improved - what is the significance of this model to our experimental results? what this model does from a macro perspective? how to draw a table for the results of repeated reports with too much content? After adopting their suggestions, we found that our mathematical model has become more detailed. The proofing process has become more rigorous, and the overall fluency has also been improved. Therefore, we are very grateful to them for helping us complete our mathematical modeling. The graph below shows specific details of our Collaboration.
Virtual Meetup with ten Friend teams
We were invited to participate in the Friend Team online meetup jointly organized by ten teams including the HZAU team, SZPT-CHINA, BIT-China, CPU CHINA Fudan, NWU-CHINA-A, NWU-CHINA-B and SZPT-China. There were two games in the morning and two in the afternoon. The main purpose of this meeting was to improve the communication among iGEM teams about different projects. Go to this link: https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1Pk4y127wG/ get more information. iGEM has very diverse teams. different people from all over the world formed a team. In this meeting, I have heard some good projects about other teams. Their consideration and research on a project were more comprehensive than I expected, and we also learned a lot. As a senior high school team, some aspects of our project were not comprehensive, so we learned a lot from this meeting and heard a lot from other experienced teams about how to make the project more perfect. We also communicated with each other about the laboratory section and the science communication section.
Fig.2 Vitual meetup with ten friend teams
Collaboration with NJU-China as a mentorship
At the beginning of this year, due to the effect of Covid - 19 outbreak, our cooperation with NJU-Chinawas mainly conducted online through QQ. The project cooperation and communication between us and the Nanjing University team are beneficial because we both study about cancer and RNA. They provided us with guidance and advice as a university team. We found that Nanjing University is very experienced in this area and gave us a lot of help in this regard. He gave us a lot of useful suggestions and put forward some questions about our project design, which helped us complete this project. The cooperation went smoothly.
Furthermore, during the Covid-19 pandemic, our team and the NJU team extensively discussed cancer patients' struggles under this public health emergency. Because the medical resources are in short supplies, many patients at Wuhan could not receive regular medical treatments, such as drug prescription, chemotherapy, and physical reexamination. As a local team at Wuhan, we are deeply concerned with these patients and feel empathetic with their difficulties. We shared a lot of insights on this problem with the NJU-China, and hope that this first-handed information can help them build their public engagement on cancer.
Fig.3 Collaboration with NJU-China team
Collaboration in public activities
Additionally, in order to draw public attention about breast cancer and attract more talented individuals to the field of Synthetic Biology, we participated in a public event with Worldshaper-Shanghai, Worldshaper-Nanjing and ASTWS-China teams. This was a science and technology exhibition organized by Hangzhou government. Our four teams distributed pamphlets about our peojects to visitors attending the exhibition. The pamphlet designed by our team contains knowledge of iGEM and synthetic biology as well as tips on how to prevent and self-check breast cancer. At the same time, this event was also a perfect experience of sharing our projects. Communicating with them about the aspects that we were not mastered at helped us improve. To be more specific, we talked about the topic of wiki-building, modelling, public propagation, etc. Since then, they gave us some detailed advice, suggestions and ideas which were helpful for later improving our assessments. The central part that our team learned from the others was about wiki. Before this public activity was held in Hangzhou, our team websites had slow progress. After the teammate from Worldshaper-shanghai who was responsible for wiki taught us the essential technique of building the websites, our wiki building became more orderly and progressively. Apart from that, we took photos with Worldshaper-Shanghai, Nanjing, Hangzhou altogether to strengthen the relationships and be more familiar with them. It was an unforgettable and impressive experience shared with these teams. In short, from this public activity in Hangzhou, we not only received some technical assistance from Worldshaper-Shanghai, Nanjing, and Hangzhou but also built the bridge of delivering the fundamental contextualization of our project. We are thankful for their sincerely helping.
Photo1/2 Collaboration in public activities