Team:XH-China/Collaborations
Offline communication with Shenzhen University team
Due to this year's Coronavirus pandemic, many IGEM teams have difficulties with accessing laboratories and acquiring needed resources. As the epidemic situation improves, college students began to return to the campus to complete their long-suspended lab experiments, giving us a chance to meet with the Shenzhen University team (SZU-China).
The meeting took place in Shenzhen University. 3 members are allowed to enter the campus at once, and 3 of our team members visited the site on the early morning of July 14th. During the meeting, we discussed the similarities and strengths of our experiment details with the university's professor. The professor in return offered many valuable advices on our project and highlighted a few flaws within our plan, giving us a better picture on our future plans.
Members from the school's team introduced us to some of their commonly-used equipments and the experiment they were working on. Although the meeting lasted for only half a day, both teams gained valuable knowledge from each other, making our trip a meaningful one.v
Online communication with several teams from the other regions of China.
One of the effects of this year's epidemic is that opportunities for cooperation between IGEM teams are far more limited, making many teams slightly overwhelmed. Thus, it became necessary for teams to communicate in a much wider scope and make proper adjustments to the communication styles. In order for teams to understand the basic topics and current progresses of other teams' projects and improve themselves through interaction with others, we organized an online meeting with Hangzhou, Shanghai, and Beijing.
On the evening of August 4th, the meeting was hosted on Zoom, and each team in turn shared their projects, their processes, and the problems they found in their processes. The followings are summaries of the projects and problems shared by the teams who have participated in the meeting.
Hangzhou team (ASTWS-China):
Treatment of sediment from sewage treatment plants. Primary focus on micro plastic pollution.
Problems:
the experimentation time was limited, and many factories were closed. Both are a result of the impacts from the Coronavirus pandemic.
Shanghai team (Worldshaper-Shanghai):
Treatment of potential Prostate Tumor patients by testing the patients' urine.
Problems:
difficulty with acquiring the urine from patients; the variable controls are not obvious.
Nanjing team (Worldshaper-Nanjing):
Problems:
the focus of the presentation was unclear: it mainly talked about experiment details rather than the project's significance and purpose.
In the meeting, each team first present their project through a Powerpoint presentation. After a team completes their presentation, the other teams and an additional professor are allowed ask questions, express opinions, and suggest advices for the team. After our team completed our presentation of the problems we're currently facing, the other groups provided us with practical suggestions and inspirations, which helped us a lot in the rest of the experiment and other promotion plans.