Team:XMU-China/Collaborations
No one can make great progress without advice and golden ideas from their excellent partners. During last six month, we participated in some iGEM conferences and even worked as the innovative online meeting organizers. Hopefully these events contributed greatly to all of us.
Our team members participated in the iGEM Southern China Regional Meeting which was held online by Shenzhen University this year. The meeting attracted more than 15 teams from south of China to introduce their project design and prompted us to establish contacts with some other teams after the meeting.
We had several in-depth communication with CSU-China, SCU-China and XJTU-China (See the details in the next section) in design of the kill switches' genetic circuit. As we hope to construct an innovative project, the conmunication encourages us to design the gene circuits of kill switches through brainstorming. The meeting was a great impetus for us to attention to “An-tea Glyphosate” using synthetic biology.
Because of the global outbreak of COVID-19, the style of communication has been changed a lot. We chose to hold an online meeting with CSU_CHINA, SCU-China and XJTU-China. In the meeting, four teams shared background and design of the projects, human practices, as well as kill switch systems with each other. It is supposed to be beneficial to the development and improvement of our projects in the long run.
It is meaningful and time-saving for us to be guided and operate our expeiments through establishing an appropriate model. This year, with the communication of CSU-China on the modeling of mutated phnJ, we found an easy way to compute the binding energy between our mutation and the endogenous C-P lyase with Rosetta, which enabled us to model on personal computers equipped with the normal hardware. Also, CSU-China suggested us to rent a server to run MD to enhance the accuracy of the model. Besides, we also gave them some advice on the design of kill switch by introducing the amplification system based on the phi73 delta protein.
This year, we used mf-Lon protease to accelerate the “deadman” system as one of the plan in kill switch design of our detection part. However, the gene mf-Lon is not easy to synthesize and we cannot get it from the gene synthesis corporation till September. Luckily, QHFZ made similar design with mf-Lon protease in their project, and provided us with the plasmids which carry gene mf-Lon, helping us carry out our next experiments more smoothly.
The unboxing video is recorded below.
Xiamen University, Fujian, China
No.422, Siming South Road, Fujian, P.R.China 361005
