Team:Worldshaper-Shanghai/Partnership

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Partnership

Worldshaper-Shanghai × NEFU_China

Preface

One of iGEM’s goal is to encourage students to cooperate with each other to finish an project and achieve a better result. We realize that iGEM provides us with a great platform and opportunity to improve our team cooperation skills, which is greatly beneficial to our future study and career. Luckily, we have established partnership with NEFU_China whose research interest is also about deep collaboration. Also, as a high school team, we don’t have enough experience and professional knowledge as university teams do. Thus, it is a great honor and luck for us to receive assistance from NEFU_China, and we learn a lot from discussing with them. We collaborate for the whole season in both wet lab and dry lab.

Pre-season preparation | May

As high school students, we need a lot of professional knowledge at the beginning of the project. After receiving our invitation, NEFU_China carried out several trainings with us. Our team holds online meetings with NEFU_China to discuss the competition itself and the overall knowledge of Synthetic Biology. Students of NEFU_China also taught our members about basic knowledge of molecular biology and genetic engineering such as mechanism of DNA replication, function of restriction endonucleases, helping us better master the knowledge essential to this competition and experiments. As NEFU has deployed teams to attend several sessions of iGEM competition, they have more experience about this competition than us. Then they told us about some tips about how to manage this competition such as establishing wiki, holding live stream, etc.

Fig.1 NEFU_China explains the basic knowledge to us

Project discussion and experimental skills training | June

Throughout June, our team was dedicated to the project design. NEFU_China invited us to a online conference to discuss our projects and make suggestions to each other’s project. Their project is about a novel nucleic acid test method based on G-quadruplex and our project is about a novel Drosophila AD drug screening model. We discussed some details of our experiments plan and outline of projects. Then they taught us basic knowledge and dos and don’ts about PCR, SDS-Page and other molecular biology experiments. We know the four steps of PCR, how to use pipette, and how to create recombinant DNA by connecting DNA and plasmid. This assists us in better preparing ourselves for our experiments.

Fig.2 Online project discussion

Exchange ideas about our HP and education plans | July to August

In the summer, a such important period, we started the core work in the dry team plans. NEFU_China and us hold an online meeting in the beginning of July to discuss our plans about Human Practice work and activities. First, we showed NEFU_China our interview plan and current progress, and they gave us clear ideas and valuable suggestions. Then we talked about what activities we planned to hold such as cooperating with school clubs to promote our projects, hold online live stream. After the discussion, we plan to hold an online live stream on Bilibili together.

Fig.3 Brainstorming on team work

Holding an online live streaming on Bilibili | September

We hold the live streaming on Bilibili with NEFU_China on October 6. This live streaming was mainly for some kindergarten children. Since those children are very young and don’t have much biology knowledge, we prepare some basic point about drosophila and Alzheimer's disease. When we finished, we asked the children some questions to see if they remember the knowledge.

Fig.4 The joint live streaming for children

Wiki establishing | October

In the final submission phase, we encountered some troubles when our team tried to insert our promotion video on the main page of our wiki. We did not know the specific codes for inserting the video into website. Then NEFU_China used VSCode to help us solve this problem. We sent our original codes to them and they analyzed which step was wrong and then corrected it.

Fig.5 Debug of wiki programming