Team:BJU China/Partnership
Partnership
Overall Objective:
In our project collaboration, we have formed a partnership with NWU-CHINA-A to cooperate and help each other in different aspects, in addition to the education activities mentioned in the collaboration, we also did collaborations in the following areas:(see our partner wiki)
1. Communication
During our project process, we had a communication meeting with NWU-CHINA-A and we both shared our project. Both of us were surprised that our projects overlap with each other on some aspects especially 6BrIG production. NWU-CHINA-A is trying to apply 6BrIG to the dyeing industry. While we proposed to imply our manufacturing product on sensitized solar cell layers and semiconductor industries. We talked to each other about the project and asked some questions about how to improve both projects. We asked them what their final product would be like and they mentioned that we should be well-known about our project background, especially the knowledge about semiconductors and electricity.
Fig.1 Initial communication with NWU-CHINA-A
1. Modeling
In the communication with the NWU-CHINA-A team, we wanted to seek help with NWU-CHINA-A since we were not familiar with modeling and Matlab at first. In further communication, the NWU-CHINA-A team members held lectures to help us be familiar with the Matlab interface and also understand differential equations and use Matlab to solve differential equations.
In our team's subsequent modeling, we keep contact with NWU-CHINA-A team to seek help from them.
Fig.2 Modeling communication with NWU-CHINA-A
Moreover, during our following modeling and modeling refinement process, NWU-CHINA-A modeling team members also provided us references and helped us refine our modeling content: for example, pointing out the limitations of the application of Michaelis-Menten Equation and considering in a biochemical reactions method to costruct our model; correlating the total amount of enzymes with the total amount of bacteria; and enzyme interactions and regulations, etc.
Fig.3 Modeling communication and evaluation
2. Experiments
In terms of experiments, since our two teams have the same purpose, to produce tyrian purple, we often had discussions about our experimental operations and methods, and we also provided NWU-CHINA-A with CRISPR Cas9 plasmids for their knockout experiments.
In the fermentation experiments, NWU-CHINA-A found that E. coli without mutation couldn't turn to significant purple color even after transforming the target plasmid, which provided us with empirical guidance for mutation TnaA necessity. And we also pointed out in our previous molecular cloning of TnaA-MaFMO plasmid that the TnaA gene in E. coli 's own genome may affect the identification of molecular clones, and therefore the plasmid needs to be extracted for testing. During our fermentation process, we failed to produce 6BrIG products and we talked about our experiment problem with NWU-CHINA-A, they gave us advice by only using medium instead of NPB buffer with tryptophan.
The help on issues such as experimental communication and component provision was very helpful for our two teams' experiments and 6BrIG production, and gave a very good boost to our two teams' project completion.
