Team:XMU-China/Collaborations
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When everybody adds fuel, the flames rise high. Strengthening the iGEM community is one of our values. We think that intercultural exchange helps us to improve ourselves and to be a part of an inclusive culture. For the last six months, we participated in some conferences and even worked as the innovative online meeting organizers. Hopefully these events contributed greatly to all of us.
We proposed and hosted a meeting, “collaboration before CCiC”, just two days before Conference of China iGEMer Community (CCiC). The purpose of this online meeting was to improve the understanding among the university teams involved, and to give suggestions to each other in order to help each team to show their best in the upcoming CCIC. 5 teams were attracted to present their project designs at the conference, including XMU-China, CSU_China, CPU_CHINA, ShanghaiTech_China, and UESTC-China. Members from different teams shared opinions on what design can be modified and what work can be down collaboratively. All attendants were given a platform to practice their presentation capability during the meeting. We’re happy to see that three teams (XMU-China, CPU_CHINA, ShanghaiTech_China) that participated in this meeting were selected as the Best Presentation Finalist of CCIC.
Due to the COVID-19, our team members were unable to travel offline to attend the 8th Conference of China iGEMer Community held by Fudan University this year. During the post-conference discussion, some teams showed great interest in our web design and we had a brief communication on some specific aspects, which helped us a lot to improve the interactivity and aesthetics of our wiki.
Our dry lab members were invited by the CCiC to give a short talk in the modeling workshops and communicate with the teams which have modeling problems. During the workshop, our member gave an overview of mathematical modeling from the perspective of cross-discipline to help participants to locate their problems and solutions. Then we talk about the modeling difference between the foundational project and application project from our own experience of the iGEM competition. Finally, some papers were introduced for general biologic process modeling and we had the QA time to discuss the modeling problem especially. More importantly, we have discussed phenomena about the abuse of machine learning technology. We believe that our team has enhanced the understanding of modeling among the iGEM teams which joined the workshop and have solved some modeling problems. The XMU-China is also looking forwards to the next model workshops.
Our team also participated in the ICII(In China In iGEM) initiated by NAU-CHINA and CPU_CHINA, which aimed to serve as a bridge between iGEM teams and to organize students to participate in offline presentations at science and technology museums or exhibition halls. The purpose was to popularize the knowledge of synthetic biology to a wider audience. Our team responded actively to this activity and went to Xiamen Science and Technology Museum to spend a full day on popular science activities. This activity is not only an annual routine for our team, but also an application and demonstration for the education materials we designed this year.
At the ICII, we met NUDT and they appreciated the game materials used in our activity in Xiamen Science and Technology Museum. They wanted to showcase our game materials at the science fair they hosted in their local, and we agreed happily. So the games we designed this year were displayed in the National Science Day activity, in which our games received numerous positive feedbacks. It’s been proved that our education materials have a wide range of applications.
NNU-China invited us a talk in the early stage of their team formation. NNU-China is a newly established team, while XMU-China has been participating this competition since 10 years ago. We had a video conference with them, during which we shared our experience about team formation and tournament organization. After the meeting, we had a long term communication with NNU-China about the topics mentioned above and maintained a happy partnership.
This year, OUC-China are devoted to create a whole cell biosensor which have higher sensitivity, lower leakage, better signal-noise ratio and larger dynamic range. Therefore, the selection of components is very important for us. The modeling group needs to accurately evaluate the system through parameter fitting and predict the system performance. They encountered problems in parameter fitting. Then OUC-China turned to XMU-China, which gave us great help in parameter fitting.