Difference between revisions of "Team:CSU CHINA/Partnership"

It is hard to make a forest out of a single tree. That is why we focused on various ways for collaborations to occur, both online and offline. Compared with communication, long-term and in-depth cooperation is of more value. In the spirit of a globally connected iGEM community, we have established a deep cooperation partnership with the NUDT_CHINA and XMU_China throughout the season. Through various forms of collaboration, including mutual use of experimental instruments, joint education and publicity, exchanges of questionnaires and analysis, we are closely linked in modeling, video production, HP, experiment and other aspects, promoting each other and making progress together. We believe that the collaboration is helpful not only for a better understanding of the project but also to give full play to our respective strengths and optimize resource allocation. Our ultimate goal is to participate in undertakings that have a significant positive impact on both the teams that collaborate with us and the general public.

August 2nd，2020

At the South China conference, XMU_China attracted us for our same target to move out toxic chemicals from agricultural products. This day, XMU_China and CSU_CHINA's teammates gathered online to discover an efficient way to cooperate. Based on our projects' introduction, we enhanced the understanding of each other. We made it possible to interchange ideas and information.

In the experimental design, XMU_China devote themselves to degrading the glyphosate in tea, while CSU_CHINA's goal is to reduce the cadmium content in soil or water to obtain healthier edible rice. Coincidentally, all we need to do is to detect, degrade and prevent engineering bacteria from escaping. For this reason, we launched a series of discussions, including experiments, modeling and human practices. We chose some of the conversations and divided them into mentoring and being mentored to show.

Mentor:

In addition to binding cadmium ions, merR protein may also be interfered with by other ions, such as mercury ion. Then how to handle the interference of other ions?

The pMer is indeed a mercury promoter, but we can use a screening mutant to disconnect from mercury ions, but can specifically recognize cadmium ions.

The self-protection mechanism of Syncytial algae may transfer cadmium ions out. Do you need to knock out its external transport function to achieve cadmium enrichment?

Transferring out does play a protective role. If it is knocked out, the survival condition of the algae may be affected. We bring in a protein that transports cadmium inward. If its transport efficiency is high, the role of the transferring out protein can be ignored.

We have some questions about the Human Practices. When we interviewed stakeholders, they were reluctant to accept interviews because of some sensitive issues. Is there a right solution?

We encountered such problems when contacting sewage treatment plants and government agencies. We actively seek teachers' help, looking for related enterprises or departments cooperating with teachers to enhance trust.

Being mentored:

We want to convert the biological network into an equation, but the active oxygen network is getting larger and larger. How can we convert it into a simple equation?

It will be very troublesome if the massive metabolic system is listed one by one. The whole network analysis can see some metabolic flux analysis, which will be more convenient. And we generally use a few ODE.

When experimentally designing the detection part, will the extra-membrane detection be interfered with due to the escape of NADPH?

This problem does exist. We can draw the standard curve in the initial experiment, consider the error and eliminate it.

We gave some suggestions to XMU_CHINA and obtained some new ideas through this activity, which is beneficial to our projects' promotion. How to ensure the safety of engineering algae has plagued us for a long time. To our surprise, XMU_China's design of the Toxin-Antitoxin ( TA) system uses MazE and MazF, exceptionally inspiring us.

In their MazE-MazF system, ATc in the culture environment is like a "protective umbrella". When the engineering algae is lying under the umbrella controlled by ATc, MazE is like a knight who resists MazF's toxic damage to algae. Suppose the algae escape from the safe environment that ATc exists. In that case, MazF loses its protective capacity, which causes the positive feedback caused by delta with ORF, making the toxin MazF like a "hungry wolf" to eliminate the "stray sheep" instantly.

This delicate design inspired us. After consulting documents, we found that the TA systems are widely distributed in prokaryotes and archaea. The TA operon encodes a stable toxin and an easily degraded antitoxin to regulate bacterial metabolism. Given this, we combined our own components to modify, adding a light-controlled suicide system to enhance our engineering algae's safety. To learn more about our experiment, please click: https://2020.igem.org/Team:CSU_CHINA/Description.

Moreover, our interchange also reflects in the sharing of instruments. We sent some samples of cadmium-absorbed algae to XMU_China. They helped us process them and measured the concentration of cadmium ions in our algae using their ICP-AES.

We also give each other a help in the modeling and human practices. We communicate with aspects below:

This was an in-depth communication covering several parts of the experiment, model and human practices. In practice, we will inevitably encounter obstacles that hinder the process. At this time, mutual inspiration and exchange of needs will lead to a win-win situation. That is what we learned from this cooperation.