Team:DUT China A/Collaborations
iGEM Aptamers Hub
Collaborating Teams: iGEM Athens, iGEM Madrid, iGEM Pasteur-Paris, iGEM Rotterdam, iGEM Strasbourg, iGEM BOKU-Vienna, iGEM Cornell, iGEM CSMU Taiwan, iGEM DUT China A
Thanks to the initiative of iGEM Team Athens, the iGEM Aptamer Hub is established. While doing our research for our project, we many times wished for there to be a more formal platform for anybody working with aptamers to be able to share ideas, advice, and feedback. For this reason, most of the teams working with aptamers this year created the iGEM Aptamers Hub.
The iGEM Aptamers Hub aims to enable the use of aptamers during the iGEM competition and encourage their use in laboratories worldwide. We curate an ‘’aptamer registry’’, create a network with aptamer researchers, and provide the community with useful resources to facilitate their research. For this collaboration, our team develop a method to capture the circulating tumor cells (CTCs) and provide a short summary of our project as well as detailed protocols we used in our project. Moreover, we also attribute to inviting related researchers to be contributors for the iGEM Aptamer Hub. We will continue to invite relative scholars to join our hub and give technical support for iGEMers. We also did Skype meeting with other teams to discuss what we should construct for our hub. It’s really meaningful and we hope that the iGEM Aptamer Hub will grow and provide useful information for the future iGEM team!
Collaboration with XMU-China
We intended to use mathematical modeling method to design an inhibiter for triggering the formation of cell-targeted DNA hydrogel. However, we could not find a proper algorithm for the modeling process until we occasionally discovered that the team XMU-China successfully accomplished a similar stimulation. We contacted XMU-China during CCiC and received plenty of instructions and inspirations from Jiyang Zheng, the leading member of their modeling part. Finally, we designed a program based on the lowest energy theory and successfully stimulated the sequence of inhibitor.
Conference of China iGEMer Community (CCiC)
From August 19th to 23th, we attended the 6th CCiC in Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology Chinese Academy of Science. More than 70 teams coming from more than 60 schools all over China presented their project and share their experience by displaying their poster and giving presentations. Eight top scholars from research institutes and collages shared their precious experience on leading iGEM projects. During the conference, we discussed our project with many other iGEM teams and received multiple feedback. More importantly, we received modeling suggestion from Xiamen University, which really helped a lot with our modeling process. Jing He, primer PI of HZAU-China, giving meaningful guidance to our project, thus we turned to focus on the rolling circle amplification (RCA, or R) to form the hydrogel after attending the CCiC.
During the CCiC, we also organized a meet up within four Universities located in the north-east of China, including NEU-China, jilin-China, DUT China A and DUT China B. We exchanged our idea and got precious advice from other teams. This meet up definitely help us to adjust our design.
(Left to right: Yihang Ma, Qirui Liu, Yichun Zhao, Xiangcheng Dai, Veronica Liu)