Team:NPU-CHINA/Collaborations
COLLABORATION
For some difficulties, after two years, the Northwestern Polytechnical University iGEM team was successfully reorganized in 2020 and decided to participate in the 2021 iGEM competition. It is our honor to be invited to participate in the iGEM conference in the Northwest Region in May 2020. Our team was invited to Northwest University to participate in this meeting. This is the first official offline communication event that our team has participated in since our team’s establishment. At the meeting, representatives of the six teams of NWU-CHINA-A, NWU-CHINA-B, XJTU-CHINA, NPU-CHINA, LZU-CHINA, and DUT-CHINA introduced each team’s projects. After each person in charge finished the presentation, we start a two-hour question exchange. This meeting directly provided a very good platform for our follow-up in-depth collaboration.
After the meeting, we have maintained close communication with NWU-CHINA-A and XJTU-CHINA (see the next section for details). The "brainstorming" on the meeting triggered by in-depth exchanges has opened up more space for our ideas. As a newly established team, this meeting gave us more understanding and more confidence.
Since the epidemic has not yet ended, our communication with Northwest University and Xi'an Jiaotong University are mainly online. We had several online meetings and idea exchanges with the two teams. At the meeting, we mainly shared the progress of the current project, and proposed some solutions to the problems encountered based on experimental experience, thereby promoting each other's experiments.
(1)Team experience sharing
NWU-CHINA-A was the first team we got in touch. Their rich experience in participating has helped us a lot. In the initial communication of the project, the NWU-CHINA-A team provided many suggestions for the successful establishment of our team and gave us a deeper understanding of iGEM.
(2)Experimental communication
As the team slowly got in order, we also provided some help to NWU-CHINA-A. When we learned that they had problems with plasmid extraction, we recommended a new plasmid extraction kit: EasyPure Plasmid MiniPrep kit. This kit is a commonly used and has stable performance in our experiments. At the same time, when we encountered difficulties in cloning, the NWU-CHINA-A team recommended us to try the infusion cloning solution, which was tested and confirmed by them to be effective.
(3)Collaboration in education
In October 2021, we will hold an online presentation on iGEM and synthetic biology for high school students, hoping to popularize synthetic biology-related theories for students to stimulate children's interest, and to popularize project-related scientific knowledge like the hazard of Aflatoxin. In this presentation, we also invited the NWU-CHINA-A and GA_State_SW_Jiaotong teams to share the project and related scientific knowledge.
(1)Experimental communication
XJTU-CHINA and NPU-CHINA have maintained close contact. Therefore, the two teams continued to share their experiences after the iGEM Northwestern China regional Meeting to help each other solve the problems encountered in the experiment. Our team shared the method of primer design with XJTU-CHINA team and provided them with an effective molecular cloning kit: CloneExpressⅡ. After being used by the NPU-CHINA team, it is believed that this kit has a stable effect and a reasonable price.
(2)Mathematical modeling experience sharing
XJTU-CHINA is a team with many years of experience in iGEM competition in the Northwest region. When we learned that we lacked experience in mathematical modeling, XJTU-CHINA team also teach the basic knowledge of mathematical modeling for us.
As the largest iGEM academic exchange meeting in China, CCiC has been successfully held for eight years. Every year it attracts hundreds of teams from all over China to participate. The three-day sharing conference gave each team the opportunity to share their innovative designs. Due to the impact of the epidemic, we can only participate in this meeting online. However, even though the live broadcast on the spot allowed us to learn more about the content, the comments of the judges and various experts also made us discover the deficiencies in our experimental plan, and urged us to continuously improve our experimental design.
Through online communication with universities and on-site laboratory visits, we have developed sustainable friendship. In order to ensure longer-term cooperation and development, initiated by Northwest University, universities in the northwest region have jointly established a Northwest Co-construction Part Base for storing various parts for easy reuse in the future.
In the online communication at the beginning of the project, we found that our project has many similarities with the GA_State_SW_Jiaotong team. After the first online meeting, we confirmed the next cooperation in partnership, experiment, HP, education, etc. In this process, the mutual help and interactive feedback between the two teams have played a very good role in promoting our projects.For details,please see: (Partnership)
CONTACT NPU CHINA
NPU-CHINA is the iGEM team of Northwestern Polytechnical University
Address: 127 West Youyi Road Beilin District, Xi'an,
Shaanxi 710072, China
Contact: npuigem@outlook.com
bilibili: NPU-iGEM
