Team:THIS-China/Partnership

index THIS-China

THIS-China
Projects

Description ⟩

Design ⟩

Model ⟩

Notebook ⟩

Safety ⟩
Experiment

Protocol ⟩

Results ⟩

Future Work ⟩
Parts

Parts ⟩

Contributions ⟩

Engineering ⟩

Improved Parts ⟩
Application

Proposed Implementation ⟩

Hardware ⟩

Entepreneurship ⟩
HP

Integrated HP ⟩

Edu. & Comm. ⟩
Team

Members ⟩

Attributions ⟩

Collaboration ⟩

Partnership ⟩
Awards

Figure 1: iGEM 2021 North China Meetup.

Collaboration & Partnership

THIS-China is involved in the collaboration and partnership with numerous iGEM teams around Beijing. Of the numerous projects we’ve exchanged our ideas with, teams Tsinghua and QHFZ are the two teams in which we’ve collaborated the most with. We have collaborated numerous times over a long period of time, and these collaborations have been mutually beneficial.

Partnership with Team Tsinghua.

Figure 2: Logo of Tsinghua University's iGEM team.

Our team first met team Tsinghua at the North China iGEM meetup in June hosted, by Tsinghua High School around the beginning of the iGEM competition timeline. In the meetup, we learned team Tsinghua’s projects and introduced our project to them. Through this opportunity, we established a partnership with team Tsinghua.

experience, so they initially focused on providing us with insights and judging the feasibility of our project as well as directing our attention to potential problems. For instance, they questioned how unique our project was compared to the test paper that is currently available on the market. This led us to do more research regarding various products on the market, and we found out that the current products on the market cannot test a specific bacteria. This is why we chose to focus specifically on the detection of S. mutans. The safety problem has also been stressed by the Tsinghua Team, which led us to think about designing a hardware to make the whole system “cell-free” to increase the safety, allowing the user to use the product in their home.

After the first few meetings, we decided to hold regular meetings. These started in July and have continued since then, with our teams meeting around 2 times per month. Throughout the meetings, we discuss the details of each other’s projects, and team Tsinghua also helps us on specific lab problems that we encounter. In particular, team Tsinghua gave us the idea of conducting two plasmids instead of one when we found that we were unable to successfully express the comD and comE proteins. After communication and experiment, we successfully expressed the two proteins. In addition, after we tested our whole system and found out that the comDE system was unable to successfully pick up the CSP signal, team Tsinghua proposed that something might have been wrong with the membrane protein. After more communication and research, we found out that comD is a membrane protein that does not have a signal protein. Therefore, the protein only folds and goes onto the membrane because of the hydrophobic amino acid, a process that is difficult to accurately accomplish. Even though we do not have time to conduct further experimentation to solve this problem, we now know what is wrong and have ways to improve on our project in the future.

In addition, we also decided to collaborate on the website, hardware, and modeling. For websites, we hosted meetings with team Tsinghua and explored how to formulate the drop bar, make a website template, and write html code. Moreover, we also discussed how to form the Parts pages and to enter correct information for the corresponding parts. We also gave advice to each other group’s mathematical modeling to ensure that we explained everything in logic and clarity. This has helped both of our teams check whether our models are easy to understand.

Besides from team Tsinghua helping us, we also helped Team Tsinghua by producing a video about synthetic biology, which can help both of our teams to educate primary and secondary students. We mainly designed the storyline of the video and took on the role of producing it, while team Tsinghua gave us advice on how to make the video concise and accurate. From the video, both of our groups are able to receive human practice and education experiences. More information can be found on the Education page.

In addition, we also helped the Tsinghua team to evaluate their summer camp PowerPoint for high schoolers. We gave them advice on how to make sure that the information they presented is at a suitable level for high school students. For example, instead of directly talking about what synthetic biology is, we proposed that there should be more information about the basics of biology, and that the basic concepts used in synthetic biology should first be introduced. These include things such as DNA, RNA, and central dogma, and should be introduced so a high school audience can relate what they have learned in biology to synthetic biology. Finally, we suggested focusing more on engineering bacteria instead of animals because it is simpler and can be more easily understood by a typical high school student.

More information about our partnership with Tsinghua can be found at https://2021.igem.org/Team:Tsinghua/HP/partnership

Figure 3: Tsinghua team and THIS-China team meeting.