Team:Yonsei Korea/Contribution
Introducing:
Our Team
During our project, we utilized two main parts: a DNAzyme and a mif23 gene fragment. Further explanation can be found in here.
TROUBLESHOOTING
1. Earlier stage:
In our earlier stage, the biggest trouble our team faced was getting financial support. Since we were the first to participate in the iGEM from Yonsei University, we had to start from the very beginning such as gathering team members, contacting potential primary instructors, or getting approval from the faculty for using a laboratory. Our initial team members assembled from our mutual school course, Industrial Bioconvergence. One student, who happens to be our team leader Symbat, introduced the competition to our class and those who were interested in the competition joined the team.
Despite the excitement we had in our first meeting, the first wave of hardships came as the registration fee due date was coming up. Since we could not afford it by ourselves, we decided to reach out to companies, faculty, professors, and alumni to get financial support. After making a list of potential sponsors, we contacted them via emails and phone calls. Even though most of them did not respond or rejected our request, we did not give up trying another option. Thankfully, several professors started donating their own money to help us fundraise our registration fee and a few companies suggested helping us with their equipment and material accessibility. We were able to focus on choosing our topic and start planning out our laboratory work owing to their grateful aid.
2. Mid-stage (laboratory - optimizing phase):
Launching our laboratory work proved to be no small task in itself; we quickly learned of the many obstacles that posed challenges to undergraduates pursuing research. Due to the COVID-19 situation, it was immensely difficult for us to search for labs to conduct our research and advisors to supervise us. Eventually, we were thankfully able to contact our primary investigators and advisor and begin research. We conducted our summer research in between our PI’s lab and empty undergraduate educational laboratories through the understanding of the office. Thus, we were able to begin the experimental phase of our research.
However, even with access to a lab and many wonderful advisors and graduate students to get advice from, our experiments did not go smoothly. Our cleavage assay, while seeming fine in theory, did not show detectable results even after multiple repetitions and attempts at optimization. Although frustrated, we constantly searched for new methods to optimize our experiments. After a copious amount of effort, we finally got the results we wanted by ordering our synthetic DNA from a different source as our experiment was extremely base-pair sensitive. We all learned of the hardships and frustrations that could occur from conducting research through the experience, as well as how to go about solving them.
3. Collaborations:
Although many of our team members had enjoyed previous research experience at various institutions, it was the first time for any of us to conduct student-driven research. We had no established connections with other teams, and we had to start everything from scratch with no idea where to start. As a result, we were somewhat timid to present our research to other teams who seemed already fully experienced and confident in their research, as well as the science behind it. Still, we endeavored to manifest ourselves out there and look for collaboration opportunities so we could learn and grow with other teams. As we gained more experience presenting our research and sharing our experiences, we learned that many teams underwent similar struggles and challenges which we went through regarding not just research, but the iGEM experience as a whole. As we talked to several teams, we became more sure in our research and began to own it genuinely. Collaborations opened our eyes and helped us find out what kind of researchers we pictured ourselves to be.
4. Conclusion:
We believe that our efforts as the first team to participate from our university have contributed greatly to laying the groundwork for those who will later challenge the same competition. Also, we hope that our work can positively influence Korea and other countries that do not have an established culture of iGEM.
Yonsei_Korea is a convergent team of students based in Seoul, South Korea striving to create meaningful change utilizing synthtic biology in the iGEM 2021 Competition.