Team:Shanghai HS/Collaborations
Collaboration
Alpha Luco （Fujian_United）
We collaborated with Alpha Luco, a team aiming at reducing the price of alcohol products by taking advantage of autocrine glycosylase probiotics. They hope to increase the manufacture of alcohol products as well as other staples in the industrial world. During our collaboration, we communicated the obstacles that we met during the work of both the wet team and dry teams' work, trying to brainstorm new ideas to push our projects further.
First, we shared the challenges that the wet team met while conducting the experiments in the laboratory, and we surprisingly found some compatibilities. For instance, we both struggled to find feasible, innovative ideas due to experimental failures and limitations. The laboratory rejected our idea of increasing the thermo-stability of Antibody X due to the excessive complexity of the procedure. Professionals also rejected their innovative ideas to develop an alcohol beverage that features the autocrine glycosylas probiotics to reduce cost. However, professionals of the alcohol industry indicated that this approach is already tested and proven to be impractical by researchers. In turn, we suggested they steer their direction to a less saturated industry. Our communication provided each other with understanding and mental support and generated effective methods to solve our challenges.
Moreover, our dry team met similar obstacles as well. As both of our groups wanted to facilitate a charity sale to promote our projects to the public and for fundraising purposes, Alpha Luco asked questions about our location and strategies to innovate peripheral products. We had an effective conversation to address these problems; for example, the peripheral product can be an entertainment product that meets the mass demand of people on recreating. It would achieve the fundraising goal by meeting the requirement of the public, just as the RPDG script we wrote. Furthermore, the location for charity sale can be found on some professional rental platforms so that we can educate the public about our projects while conducting the activity. Although we tried to proceed the charity sale collectively, we failed to do so due to logistic reasons. Nonetheless, we both enjoyed and learned from our collaboration with each other.
Pro-CASei （Shanghai_HS_ID）
Our team also collaborated with Pro-CASei, a team aiming to remove the restriction endonuclease from the flora to improve the conversion efficiency of exogenous DNA in Lactobacillus casei. During our collaboration, we built a friendship with them so that we might collaborate more in the future and exchanged our experience working specifically in the dry team. In addition, we shared inspirations and innovations of our respective projects, solved the challenges that we met, and generated new insight. We especially appreciated their help on our project.
First, a discussion of the business plan steered the direction of our project. When we mentioned that our goal was to improve the thermo-stability of the vaccine because some third-world places did not have facilities to transport and preserve the antibody, Pro-CASei pointed out that it was not practical from a business angle. Instead of improving the single antibody, they advised that it would be better to improve the cold chain transportation around the world directly. In addition, the low thermo-stability is a universal drawback of protein products, so we could contribute more to the world if we use our budget on improving the facilities instead of focusing on a single product. Our team thought that it made sense and discussed it with members of our wet team, which changed our project's direction.
What’s more, the way they arranged their work and the structure of the whole team inspired us to adjust ours. Because they have a relatively small team of 8 students, they needed to frequently exchange works, meaning that the team members were not stuck to the dry team or wet team. They all spent a few days on both the wet team and the dry team, which enabled each team member to know exactly which stage of the project they were in, what they had done so far, and what they needed to do and improve. Their familiarity with the overall project amazed us, and we discovered that the interaction between our dry and wet team was not enough. Thus, we adopted their mode of working and changed ours.
Above are two main points that we learned from them, but we didn’t just gain. Because some of their members were not familiar with the dry team’s work as they just transferred from the wet team, we shared examples of what we have done, such as surveying and sending out questionnaires. In addition, we discussed the charity event that we were planning to promote our project to the public, which gave them some inspiration. Overall, the collaboration with Pro-CASei changed our direction of research, improved the collaboration within our team, and developed a mutually beneficial relationship.
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