Team:USTC-Software/Collaborations
Collaborations
SJTU
During CCiC, we had a lot of interactions with other iGemers in China,
especially SJTU-Software from Shanghai Jiaotong University. Through the in-depth exchanges with SJTU-Software,
we learned that the core of their project is probe design and RNA secondary structure prediction.
Our platform is a collection of models or websites that perform protein sequence prediction,
and among the models we collected, we also have protein secondary structure prediction.
So we realized that we could collaborate on this one the part of RNA secondary structure prediction.
Thus, we started our collaboration. We added an RNA platform into our website and SJTU-Software provided their trained models which predicts the secondary structure of RNA sequences.
We have had several zoom meetings with SJTU-Software, and members of both parties often communicate in online chat group about models,
web page presentation, user requirements, etc. The addition of SJTU-Software's models makes the platform more comprehensive in its functionality.
USTC
We are closely associated with USTC, which is our school's wet team. USTC focuses on biology, so most of their members are biology majors. We have had a lot of meaningful communication throughout the project.
Initially, members of USTC-Software came up with ideas for a topic and set a general direction, which we then discussed with the wet team. Our initial idea was to develop a search engine for searching the appropriate protein backbone. Discussions with them allowed us to further clarify the feasibility and significance of the idea and to understand the needs of biologists.
After the discussion, we made appropriate adjustments to our direction. the USTC team members also made suggestions to us, suggesting that we add something of universal value to our project. Something that is not only for developers, but also for the general public. We got the idea to develop an educational version for primary and secondary school students.
Since the beginning of the project, we have had a lot of communication both online and offline. They constantly gave us help, such as answering biology questions, suggesting suitable databases, helping us test the site and giving suggestions, such as interface optimization and adding web effects, and we also provided them with some technical help.
Having a clear idea of how basic experiments are performed and what we can do to help synthetic biology researchers improve the effectiveness of their work through the process of doing biological experiments is of great importance to us in our development. Although most of our software team members were computer science majors, USTC helped us fill these gaps.
After building our project, we invited USTC to test our tools. The wet team used our website, made predictions, and compared our results with their known results. They gave us a lot of advice on how to upgrade our program. We sincerely appreciate their feedback.
Contact Us
Mail:
USTC_Software2021@163.com
University of Science and Technology of China, No.96, JinZhai Road Baohe District, Hefei, Anhui, 230026, P.R.China
