Collaborations

Team: HKUST

We have reached out to the HKUST team and set up a physical meeting in the HKUST campus in order to know more about each other’s projects. Later, on 11 Aug 2021, we were invited to take part in the HK symposium 2021 held by the HKUST team and got the chance to listen to other Hong Kong iGEM teams’ projects. Due to HKUST’s vast experience in participating in the iGEM competition, we have also sent our chimeric protein, PETase-MHETase and protein extraction protocol to HKUST and let them test our protocol to see if our protocol works and minimize the errors in our lab work.

Team: Stony_Brook

We have had an online meeting with the Stony_Brook iGEM team and have been in touch with their team throughout the summer of 2021. In our meeting, they have addressed their idea of conducting a survey. In response to that, we have summarised our experience in setting up a survey and analyzing the survey results. We then sent the Stony Brook team a document explaining the protocols of making a survey.

Team: Saint_Joseph

We have filmed a short video for the Saint_Joseph team sharing the reasons why we participated in the iGEM competition and our favorite thing about iGEM. This video is a part of their video compilation.

Team: Hong_Kong_HKU

We had a physical meetup with the Hong_Kong_HKU team to share our project elements and discuss any further plans. They also suggested a few biotechnology companies that we can reach out to for implementation.

Team: Hong_Kong_JSS

We participated in the High School iGEM symposium held by the Hong_Kong_ JSS team on 16 Oct 2021. We got to learn more about other high school teams’ work and share our experiences with others.

Team: Istanbul_Tech

The Istanbul_Tech team invited us to participate in their ethics module in which our members completed forms and discussions related to the ethical perspectives of ours and others’ projects and research.

Team: MTU-CORK

The MTU team invited us to take part in “The Martina Project” where we customize our own blank Martina. We have incorporated our project aim and logo into our Martina and the MTU team made all the received drawings into a book.

Partnership

Team: Cornell

We have contacted the Cornell iGEM team in the summer of 2021 and have been keeping in touch frequently. We set up online sub-team meetings with Cornell every two weeks and have helped each other with different elements of our projects along the way.

Firstly, the Cornell team has expressed their interest in making a survey of their own in the future. Therefore, we have also shared our survey protocol and experience in survey setting with the Cornell team.

Moreover, we invited the Cornell iGEM team to shoot a short video to introduce the iGEM competition and contents of their project— Collatrix. We have displayed their video during our educational sharing session with the Grade 7 and 8 students of GT College for them to learn more about iGEM.

On top of that, the Cornell team has invited us to make a short video detailing our project and what iGEM in high school is like. They have shown our video in their HOSA learning seminars. The video was shown to teens aged 14-17 to hopefully encourage them to be open-minded about participating in iGEM while still in high school.

Besides, we’ve helped with their product development team to design a code for the bioreactor. The task is to implement an exponential feeding system of sucrose which is mimicked using motors controlled by an Arduino. At the end of the day, they made adaptations to the code to fit their hardware setup.

Lastly, we had a troubleshooting meeting with the Cornell wet lab team. Our research team had difficulties purifying the protein chimera, and we could see a lot of bands in our SDS-PAGE result. We sent our protocol for protein purification to the Cornell wet lab team, and scheduled a meeting to troubleshoot and find solutions to this problem. In the meeting, Cornell suggested that the problem may lie on our wash buffer or loading dye. In addition, our chimera may be more sensitive to cleavage and break during the SDS-PAGE procedure. The Cornell wet lab team suggested we use DTT as the loading buffer.