We have contacted the Cornell iGEM team in the summer of 2021 and have been keeping in touch frequently. We set up online sub-team meetings with Cornell every two weeks and have helped each other with different elements of our projects along the way.
Firstly, the Cornell team has expressed their interest in making a survey of their own in the future. Therefore, we have also shared our survey protocol and experience in survey setting with the Cornell team. Moreover, we invited the Cornell iGEM team to shoot a short video to introduce the iGEM competition and contents of their project— Collatrix. We have displayed their video during our educational sharing session with the Grade 7 and 8 students of GT College for them to learn more about iGEM.
On top of that, the Cornell team has invited us to make a short video detailing our project and what iGEM in high school is like. They have shown our video in their HOSA learning seminars. The video was shown to teens aged 14-17 to hopefully encourage them to be open-minded about participating in iGEM while still in high school.
Besides, we’ve helped with their product development team to design a code for the bioreactor. The task is to implement an exponential feeding system of sucrose which is mimicked using motors controlled by an Arduino. At the end of the day, they made adaptations to the code to fit their hardware setup.
Lastly, we had a troubleshooting meeting with the Cornell wet lab team. Our research team had difficulties purifying the protein chimera, and we could see a lot of bands in our SDS-PAGE result. We sent our protocol for protein purification to the Cornell wet lab team, and scheduled a meeting to troubleshoot and find solutions to this problem. In the meeting, Cornell suggested that the problem may lie on our wash buffer or loading dye. In addition, our chimera may be more sensitive to cleavage and break during the SDS-PAGE procedure. The Cornell wet lab team suggested we use DTT as the loading buffer.
