Team:SYSU-Software/Collaborations

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Overview

In this year, the covid-19 epidemic is still a significant factor affecting the communication between iGEMers, but our team still gets involved in many activities. During these activities, we have conducted in-depth and long-term cooperation with many teams. Along this year's competition, our team participated in the 8th CCiC (Conference of China iGEMer Community) and the South China Exchange meeting, during which we were surprised to find that our project has many similarities with team SYSU-China's. Since then, our two teams have started cooperation for nearly one year. We have conducted cooperation in many aspects, and all these collaborations gave us plenty of opportunities to keep improving our projects.

Our cooperation with SYSU-China originated from the South China Exchange meeting (see Figure 1). At the conference, the participating teams shared their team projects. It was from this time that we started in-depth and multi-faceted cooperation with team SYSU-China.

Figure 1 | the south China Exchange meeting's logo

Figure 2 | teams that joined the South China exchange meeting, including SCUT-China, SYSU-China, SYSU-Software, SZU-China, SUSTech-China and SCAU-China

- Part 1: project progress aspect

At the beginning of this year's iGEM competition, the leaders of our two teams have had close communication. We have a WeChat group where we exchange project progress and problems, and we also exchange opinions on some other issues.

Figure 3 | the leaders of two teams are discussing HP plans

- Part 2: experiments aspect

In terms of experimental verification, we have also cooperated in many aspects. SYSU-China provided our team with operational suggestions in the early stage of our experiment. In addition, when our experiment encountered problems in implementation, SYSU-China provided their ideas to help us solve and complete the experiment. For example, they helped us construct expression vectors and conduct experiments in HEK-293T; they suggested that we use in vitro experiments instead of introducing two enzymes into the same E.coli cell. Apart from the above, our team predicted the structure of related proteins for SYSU-China.

Figure 4 | team SYSU-CHINA helped us plan wet-lab experiments

Figure 5 | team SYSU-CHINA helped us plan and complete wet-lab experiments

- Part 3: project communication aspect

As a result of the similarities between our two teams' projects, we would adjust and optimize our projects based on the data and information shared by us.

For example, both of our team's projects have the linker design part. So our team have provided suggestions for SYSU-China on the choices of rigid or flexible linkers. Moreover, in the model part of SYSU-China, we have provided related proteins structure prediction for SYSU-China. Of course, one of our project's parts (design of light-controlled protein aggregation) is inspired by SYSU-China's project.

Figure 6 | screenshot of the chat with Bingnan Zhao from SYSU-CHINA, discussing the linker selection problem

You can also learn more about our collaborations from our partner SYSU-CHINA: