Team:iBowu-China/Collaborations
Collaborations
April 18 Beijing Area Local Meetup
We hosted the first meetup in 2021 iGEM season
April is still an early stage for iGEM teams, and teams are recruiting and brainstorming. However, it is never too early to get to know your fellow iGEMers for this year! We believed a local meetup, the off-line, in-person type, especially in all the constraints due to the coronavirus, could serve as a great platform to jump-start every team's project. We can talk about the ups and downs during team building and project ideation, giving and receiving ideas about the project proposals, establishing connections with other teams to inspire future collaborations.
The words spread out quickly. We created invitations flyers and sent out the invitation through our WeChat channel. iGEM endorsed our meetup event, and CCiC also endorsed our event and disseminate the meetup invitation through CCiC official channel. With a week, eight teams replied with warm responses, including three college teams. The meetup was then scheduled on April 18th for a whole day with presentations from CCiC, iGEM ambassador, and participating teams.
Teams participated in this meetup are the following:
Team BNDS_China
Team QHFZ
Team BUCT
Team BUCT-China
Team SHSBNU_China
Team UCAS-China
Team RDFZ-China
Team CKWA-China
Each team presented their project in the previous year and discussed their project ideas. Dr. Li, Cheng and Dr. Jiang, Shan offered their expert suggestions regarding the scientific feasibility, social impacts, and safety considerations for each team.
After the meetup, we sent out a questionnaire to learn about how iBowu-China can host a better meetup, and also summarized feedbacks and sent them to each corresponding team. All teams benefited from the communications. For example, CKWA-China learned details of how to establish iGEM projects and started a partnership with us.
Following up the meetup, we organized a communication chatting group on WeChat that included all participating teams, CCiC personnel, and later new teams who didn't have a chance to join the meetup. Teams advertised their projects, voiced for helps both in and out of the lab, and collaborated on outreach activities. This small group works better than the big communications groups because members had met with each other and those personal contacts raised the response rate when collaborations are needed. For example, the Syn-bio Fair was advertised in the group and instantly received warm responses and participation.
BioDoodle Collaborations
iBowu-China initiated a children's coloring book on synthetic biology knowledge. We invited iGEM team's around the world to join in this great creations, and many teams kindly contributed in this collaboration.
You are welcome to move on to our collaboration page to read more about the BioDoodle, and
hereby we express our thankfulness to all the teams who contributed to the project. They are:
Team Raiders
Team MTU
Team Stonybrook
Team CHS_Missouri_US
Team UPenn
Team RuBochum
Team TU-Eindhoven
Team Go Paris-Saclay
Team IISER Thiruvananthapuram
Team Korea_HS
Team McMaster
Team Siberia
Team BIT-China
Team BUCT-China
Team NJTech-China
Team UESTC-China
BIT-China
BIT-China collaborated with iBowu-China on many asepects from Project Design, HP and EducationGateway to their Wiki: https://2021.igem.org/Team:BIT-China/Collaborations
Getting in touch
During our project design, we wish to contact and interview a closely relevant expert, Dr. Lv Bo who was affiliated with the School of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering of Beijing University of Technology. In June 2021, on the platform of the iGEM China Chatting group, we established contact with BIT-China. Thereafter, the collaboration between our team started off.
BIT-China kindly helped us to contact Dr. Lv Bo and they also wanted to have a round-table discussion about how to proceed with Human Practices, especially since iBowu-China won the nomination in 2019 for best integrated HP. We held an online meeting on July 2, 2021 and many of our team members, including our 2020 and 2021 team advisor Hedy Zhu, who was also the team leader in 2019. She briefly talked about the 2019 iBowu-China project and went over the HP of that year's competition. Hedy suggested, both to BIT-China and to our 2021 team, that we boldly take different forms of HP activities, such as visits, interviews, questionnaires, etc., and design different questions according to different objects.
Both teams briefly introduced the design of this year's projects and presented ideas for doing human practices. We iBowu-China brainstormed with BIT-China on how to relate food tastes to potential stakeholders. We suggested that BIT-China consider the issue of the nutrient content of seasonings and suggest a closed-loop HP model of visit-modify-revisit-remodify. Great HP work would involve upstream, midstream, and downstream stakeholders, and teams are expected to really connect with the community and collect suggestions from all aspects to improve.
The meetup was fruitful for both teams, and we had been in contact ever since and carried out a lot of collaboration in many aspects of the iGEM projects.
In-person communication of project progresses
In mid-July, we were pleased to have the chance to visit BIT-China on the campus to have a meetup in person.
We had lunch together with BIT-China team and later presented to each other our project progress in experimental and human practices aspects in the conference room 327, Industrial Ecology Building, Beijing Institute of Technology.
Three members of BIT-China team introduced three aspects of their "CREATIVE TASTING OFFICER" project, and we iBowu-China team gave an overview of our "Glycyrβ" project.
During the question exchange session, we iBowu-China suggested that alphafold could be used to predict protein structure for project improvement, which BIT-China tried out in the follow-up project. We suggested to use colors to indicate different flavor detection so users can easily tell.
In this exchange meeting, both sides watched the iGEM project promotional video produced by each side.
We iBowu-China also asked about the method of measuring enzyme activity for our β-glucuronidase and how to perform codon optimization, and the BIT-China team members kindly and patiently explained their answers to us.
Before we concluded the day, team leader Rachel presented our first edition of the team uniform to the BIT-China members and invited them to participate in our big education project "BioDoodle" and a promotional booklet biogallery project.
Help each other
In the follow-up time, the two teams kept in touch and exchanged ideas about education and outreach with each other in WeChat. iBowu-China thought of teaching biology to liberal arts students, and BIT-China suggested that they should talk about some biological knowledge closely related to life, which could fit well with their major, such as the integration of synthetic biology and law.
We iBowu-China brainstormed an interesting idea that together we can educate the society about some misconceptions about synthetic biology. For example, some people believe the rumor that gene sequencing can predict whether you are smart or not. iBowu-China is planning a follow-up collaboration.
Later, We iBowu-China team, together with BIT, BIT-China and BUCT-China teams, held a joint seminar presentation on "The Ethics of Synthetic Biology in the Classroom" in September 2021. iBowu-China presented on the distinction between ethics and morality and introduced what bioethics is. BIT gave a talk on biomedical ethics based on their team's project this year. BUCT-China gave a presentation on the ethical aspects of artificial meat based on their team's project this year. BIT-China gave a lecture on ethics in artificial life based on their team's project this year.
The students listened carefully and actively participated in the interaction, discussing their questions with the team and discussing their views on ethical issues in biology.
BIT-China help iBowu-China distribute BioDoodle
Our iBowu-China BioDoodle project had the honor to receive contributions of original creations by BIT-China. The project has been officially launched and made into a physical book. We mailed a collection of the hard copies to BIT-China first, and asked for BIT-China's help to distribute the book.
Meanwhile, iBowu-China wanted BIT-China to help with questionnaire about synthetic biology books. BIT-China student leader asked his elementary, middle and high school science and biology teachers to help with the promotion. At the same time, iBowu-China wanted to know How to help secondary school students in science and technology education so that we can carry out follow-up education activities.
BIT-China leader helped us and interviewed Ying Quan, his middle school biology teacher. Mrs. Quan told his that there were currently after-school service programs in both middle and high schools, and wondered if the teams could introduce something into the curriculum that was related to what our teams were doing, perhaps a training series or a collaborative group study.
Educatation Activities in BIT-China Hosted School Visit
BIT-China used the BioDoodle in the education for elementary schools, and the children colored in the BIT-China-supplied pictures and learned about biosensors as a result. Meanwhile, while reading the illustrated book, the students got to know many laboratory instruments such as PCR instruments and pipettes through the pictures.
After asking the children how they felt about using BioDoodle, BIT-China team kindly offered feedbacks to us iBowu-China. The students mentioned that the picture book was in full English and they were able to understand some of the content through the pictures, but their comprehension was limited and they hoped that a Chinese version of BioDoodle would be published.
Great suggestion and we iBowu-China team is now working on that!
iBowu-China shared Lab with RDFZ-China
We shared our lab space with RDFZ-China team during their lab's close-down due to coronavirus.Gateway to their Wiki: https://2021.igem.org/Team:RDFZ-China/Collaborations
Team RDFZ-China first established connections with us on our April 18 Beijing Area Local Meetup event. Team members kept in touch throughout the iGEM seasons and in August, RDFZ-China team's lab had to close due to COVID lock-down control. At that time, iBowu-China's lab has permission to run daily experiments with some traffic control; and RDFZ-China team reached out to us asking if we could share the lab space. We were more than happy to help out. Five of RDFZ-China team members visited and performed experiments in our lab, including plasmid extraction, PCR runs, agarose gel runs for Gibson assembly. We also discussed our experiment techniques and project designs during our lab work. The figure below shows some of the experiment work done by RDFZ-China team during their time in our lab.
BNDS-China helped iBowu-China, sending a GFP part our way
We received help from BNDS-China who offered us a much needed plasmid and a part from their 2016 toolbox.Gateway to BNDS-China wiki: Team BNDS_China
In our experiment design, we propose to use a green fluorescence protein (GFP) as an easy marker to observe the different strengths of the various promoters. At the same time, we plan to test our part including the coding sequence of β-glucuronidase on a pSB type plasmid. One reason is that the expression of the enzyme in pSB type plasmid might be different from our initial design of pet28a+ plasmid, and thus this would give us a chance to optimize the yield of the enzyme β-glucuronidase. Another reason is for the convenience of promoter substitution using Gibson assembly methods. The size of pet28a+ plasmid is big, and the success rate is relatively low if we want to clone the pet28a vector in one single PCR run. This can be easily solved if the cloning can be performed on pSB type plasmid due to its small size.
We discussed our design and concerns with Li Wanji from BNDS-China. He shared his experience in performing large-size Gibson assembly, and he kindly offered a plasmid pSB1C3 with Cm resistance from their 2016 iGEM toolkit so we do not have to purchase the material. The plasmid is loaded with a super-folded GFP (sfGFP), part number BBa_K515105, which is also what we needed for the experimental measurements.
Figure. BNDS-China sent us the part including sfGFP loaded on a plasmid pSB1C3. The materials were carefully packaged and kept at low temperature.
KEYSTONE hosted SynBio Fair and iBowu-China attended
Gateway to KEYSTONE wiki:
Team KEYSTONE
Read on our
Education and Communications
page for the details of the event.