Team:BIT-China/Human Practices
Human Practices
The Research Institute of Nutrition and Health of China Food Group Co., Ltd. is the first enterprise-oriented research center in China to systematically study the nutritional needs and metabolic mechanism of Chinese people in order to realize the health needs of Chinese people. The BIT-China team came to the Institute of Nutrition and Health of COFCO for an exchange meeting on July 26, 2019.
We visited the Institute of Nutrition and Health of China Food and Agriculture to understand its strong scientific research strength and recognize each other's professionalism. We introduced our project to the researchers of the institute, including team history, project background, project design, modeling design and project significance. They asked some questions about the project, pointed out the shortcomings (such as simple circuit design, wide application of quorum sensing system, etc.) and put forward corresponding guidance. We asked them how they could convert laboratory products into products that could be produced on a large scale in factories, and raised some questions in ordinary industrial production processes (such as common fermentation methods, cost ratio of inducers, factors affecting industrial production output, etc.) as well as the current market situation of lycopene.
COFCO Nutrition and Health Research Institute is also conducting research on nutritional products, and as a research and development center with enterprises as the main body, its researchers have unique and refined views on how to transform laboratory products into industrial mass-produced products. Their opinions and answers are of great help to the design and improvement of our project. After the meeting, we realized the current shortcomings of the project and the corresponding improvement direction, and carried out more in-depth thinking to make it more perfect. At the same time, our introduction also provides some new ideas and inspiration for the staff of the Institute of Nutrition and Health of COFCO.
As did every other team, we presented our designs and the progress we’d made by then to other teams. We made an analogy as a lead-in story for others’ better understanding of our objectives. We also shared our design of utilizing quorum sensing and T7 promotor as two parts of our system. And as a matter of fact, modeling is part that other teams were most intrigued in. Besides, we proposed our final goal of constructing an intellectual cell factory, combining our projects from past few years. Moreover, we learned a great lot from other teams who had partial same goal as we did and who also made ingenious proposal of various methods.
After presentation, we had sufficient time for exchanging ideas with other teams, which enriched our understanding of many technological methodologies and gained us further view of our own design. We had fruitful discussion with teams who had innovative thoughts for solving their problems and our shared problems. And yet new challenges were also generated from those conversations. It’s always a pleasant time as we proposed rushing ideas and tried to fit them into future views.
It’s, no doubt, a great fortune to us that we found people who had ingeniously-designed parts that would work perfectly for our purpose too. And it’s even a greater joy that we also had something they wanted all along. For such reasons we build collaborations with other teams and looked forward to working together in the very soon future. It’s also a great honor that we had a very knowledgable iGem Ambassador, Dorothy Zhang, in Beijing meeting. Based on our presentation, she gave us earnest advice, on presenting our ideas and on developing our thoughts.
Our team sent three students to participate in the 6th Conference of China iGEMer Community. We made a presentation at the conference and displayed posters.
During the meeting, many questions were raised about our project. It said that T7 strength is not high enough to express the rate-limiting enzyme, and audience made many suggestions for the design.
In response to the controversy over the strength of the T7 promoter, we have consulted various data. We believe that the "domesticated" T7 promoter in the laboratory is still strong enough to express enough rate-limiting enzymes.
In design, we consider the suggestions by other teams. We decided to divide the all genes into two and build it on the “control plasmid” and the “production plasmid”.
In order for more people, especially the young, to learn about Synthetic Biology and our projects from iGEM since 2013, we held several introduction sessions through a video in high school biology classes in RDFZ (The High School Affiliated to Renmin University of China) during October. In the video, we explained to the 10th and 11th grade students the concept of Synthetic Biology, what it does, its applications, and its future prospect along with our projects and the ultimate goal we are trying to achieve through these years’ efforts. According to the feedback we got, students all gained a better view of the leading field— Synthetic Biology. Some students even expressed that they would like to go deeper into the subject and pursue their future careers in this area. Moreover, once high school biology students, we remember how we perceived biology during early years— we treated it merely as a subject which came with quizzes and tests. But it was only when we actually majored in biology that we start to see it as a great, significant science in which humans try their best to understand their surroundings and themselves. And we found ourselves more attracted to it and held more reverence towards. And these are the true thoughts and ideas behind the video that we wanted to spread. Gladly, we got emails from many students who expressed their further gains from the video. They indeed indicated that the video, in some way, changed their view of the subject and that they began to see the concepts in the textbook as a significant part of their real life.
Therefore, it was more than an introduction of Synthetic Biology that we wanted to present. It was the ideas and understandings of Biology we gained after further learning that we genuinely had on mind.
Our team's member Fang returned to his alma mater, Nanling Middle School in the countryside during the summer vacation. There are many children living a hard life, but they dream of going to college and becoming scientists. Fang delivered a brief speech, mainly about his college life and the iGEM competition. He introduced synthetic biology to high school students with his high school knowledge. Fang said, "Although they can't fully understand it, they think it's interesting and maybe one day they will take part in the iGEM competition. "
In China, biology is considered a difficult profession to find a job, so it can be difficult for these students to get support from their parents to study biology in university. And our public education is aimed to change this situation and let biological knowledge penetrate into these economically underdeveloped areas.
On August 6, BIT-China 2019 was honored to host the iGEM Meetup in Beijing.
Beijing is not only the capital of China, but also the academic and cultural center. There are a large number of top iGEM teams in China. Frontier and amazing ideas and projects are blooming here. This meeting contributes to the collaboration and communication of the iGEM community.
Thanks for the participation of these teams, Peking, Tsinghua-A, Tsinghua, OUC-China, CAU-China, BNU-China and UCAS-China. We look forward to seeing you again in Boston！
We learned a lot from the Meetup. From the instructor of the Peking University team, we learned that there were some problems in the design of the experiment, and the project was not smart enough. We conducted a survey on this and proposed the design of the negative feedback circuit. We also discussed the improvement suggestions based on his suggestions, and determined the scheme of the control group. The fluorescence characterization was compared with the experimental group to improve our project.
In the future, we plan to produce lycopene to verify the our work and discuss the relationship with the astaxanthin line of China Agricultural University to promote exchanges and cooperation in Beijing.
Research Background
Our team is a team with a history of seven years. After the completion of each year's competition, some members complete their mission and retire with honor. Some members inherit their mission and continue to stay in the team. Many new members join the team with vision and dream. Year after year, member s come and go and different faces shuttle in the laboratory, but Bit-China has no t changed and continues to move forward.
This year, when we sought collaboration, we found that many of the teams of the past years have disappeared, while others have kept strong. This makes us realize that, like the law of the rise and fall of the dynasty, every team may experience the process of building a team, going to the peak, and then gradually declining. At the same time, we find that every year there are some common problems in our team, but due to the frequent flow of members within the team, we are not paid attention to and solved them in time. Are these common problems hidden dangers that affect our team? We start to think about: How many years will our own team last? What are the factors that affect the continued existence of a team?
The PI told us that the core of the project is the team. We agree with this point of view, and believe that team building and inheritance are the key factors that affect the existence of a team. The core and foundation of the project is not the project itself but the team and people who participate in the project, guide the project and implement the project. Only by building a team with tacit cooperation and dedication can team members complete a wonderful scientific research project more efficiently and actively.
We have been thinking about how the iGEM team can smoothly and quickly carry out the new and old inheritance, so as to improve the scientific research technology of the team members and the coordination and cooperation between the team members, strengthen the team members' understanding of synthetic biology and iGEM, complete the construction of the whole project and carry out public science education better.
This year, our team designed a questionnaire on how the iGEM team inherits the team and the team members' understanding of synthetic biology and iGEM. Our survey is not aimed at specific problems in the project, but at the problems of the team, so as to improve the project.
This is very helpful and meaningful for other teams and iGEM's own construction.
Only every iGEM team can create a harmonious team atmosphere with high efficiency and good communication, each team can complete high-quality projects, and iGEM can continue to develop and achieve a win-win situation.
Results
We collected 50 questionnaires with 40 Chinese iGEM teams participating. The results are as follows:
At the beginning of each member join the team, most members learn the related scientific research knowledge through the introduction and guidance of the former members and the internal materials of the team, and many members will take the initiative to find various materials for learning, among which communication with the previous members is considered to be the most commonly used and helpful learning method, while most team members think that the instructor demonstration is not helpful, and will not take the initiative to ask the instructor.
We are glad to see that most of the members think that iGEM experience has a great help to their study and life, and 52% of the members are willing to participate in the next iGEM competition, but only 15% of the members of a team are willing to stay.[Please check questionnaire details Question 8]We can also know that the time is the most important factor to limit the number of people staying in the team by analyzing the description of the members who are not willing to stay .
What’s worse, most teams don't have effective ways to motivate their team members to stay.
At the same time, there are many common problems in the team. The most prominent is the phenomenon of unequal division of labor and that the team members have not seriously completed the work. The second is that the experiment can not be completed as expected and the internal communication of the team. t is worth noting that the time arrangement is easy to conflict with the learning time, spending a lot of extra time on repetitive or meaningless things and the team will not play its due effect. Through the description of the respondents, we can see that many hidden dangers lie in that the team members did not learn systematically when they first joined the team, and they could not reach good communication.
We are most concerned about the inheritance of each team. It's nice to see that 64% of the teams pay attention to the importance of inheritance, and will keep the information in the whole competition process so that the next team members can better enter the competition state, but 26% of the teams don't pay attention to the inheritance of the team, and even a few teams won't provide the information to the next members.
Conclusion
This survey is very meaningful. It not only makes us realize the problems existing in the team, such as the instructor can’t really provide helpful guidance in all aspects, the importance of equal division of labor and communication in the team, the urgency of team training, etc., but also lets us know the direction of team improvement and what needs special attention when building the team later.
In this survey, we also asked each team member whether they thought there were any unreasonable or inapplicable parts in the iGEM competition system. Some of them thought that one year's competition time was too short to complete a good project, the kit box was sent too slowly, the pure software team was too few, many experimental teams completed the production of software at the same time and so on. We hope that our survey will help build a better iGEM.
We share the results of this survey with all iGEM teams. We hope that this survey can help other teams think about whether there are similar inheritance problems in their own teams, so that team managers can improve the internal construction of the team, constantly improve team members' abilities through iGEM competitions, and continuously cultivate the elites who can make contribution to the society and the world.
At the same time, we hope that iGEM members from all over the world can participate in this survey to improve the accuracy and applicability of the survey results.
For more information, please check the questionnaire details and the questionnaire summary report.