Team:JiangnanU China/Collaborations

Collaboration

We iGEMers dedicate to utilize synbio methodology for amazing applications, though we indeed have a long way to go and thankfully we won’t walk alone. Here, we’d like to review all the collaboration with other teams. The team Fudan inspired us with a paper about ANN prediction, which greatly helped us in our model. Meanwhile, the team OUC-China has identified phage infection in their lab with our phage-free booklet and we together improved it with their feedback. What’s more, together with team Jilin_China, we organized a Meetup with other four teams, and then we helped them with their strength measurement of Anderson promoter family.

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Fudan

Our team achieved an anti-phage strategy against infection in different infection periods. Therefore, it’s essential to control the promoter strength for the potential leakage or inclusion body problems. Fortunately, team Fudan inspired us that it might be interesting to use ANN for promoter strength prediction, which will save us a lot of time for test hundreds of promoters one by one in experiments. Then, they gave us a paper1 about the similar prediction method, allowing us to establish an ANN promoter strength prediction model of our own. With their help we can select more suitable promoters designed by computer simulation.

Jilin_China

1. Measurement

Team Jilin_China has measured the relative promoter strength of the P59 to Anderson promoter family, however the measurement results based on fluorescence different due to various experiment conditions. Therefore, they’d like to know whether they could repeat the experiment and get the same result in different labs. So they invited us to measure the 6 parts in our lab. Jilin_China have sent BBa_J23119、BBa_J23104、BBa_J23108、BBa_J23105、BBa_J23114 and P59 promoters to us for measurement, and the results are similar at 485 nm (excitation) / 528 nm (emission). Click here for more Jilin_China measurement data.

Figure 1. Relative fluorescence (fluorescence/OD(sub)600(subed)) intensity at emission wavelength 528 nm under excitation wavelength 485 nm of each promoter measured by (A) Jilin_China and (B) JiangnanU_China over time.

We aimed to construct a phage-resistant E. coli strain which can be applied to industrial fermentation production in the future, so we need to verify experiment under same protocol condition in different laboratories, thus we invited Jilin_China to help to test whether E. coli will use a large amount of energy to express anti-phage parts, which greatly affects their own growth. The grey relation analysis they made will be applied to our model to select the anti-phage part that has the least impact on bacterial growth.

2. Meetup

We iGEMers dedicate to utilizing synbio methodology for amazing applications, though we indeed have a long way to go and thankfully we won’t walk alone. Here comes our Jilin meetup organized by Jilin_China and us, and we had invited members from NJTech_China, NEU_CHINA and NEFU_China to participate in.

Short though the Meetup was, we learnt a lot from the senior iGEM teams in these two days, not only about synthetic biology but also about how to launch, conduct, and present an iGEM project. Having shared projects with each other, we realized that there were many aspects should be considered, such as the selection of suitable kill switches, the accuracy of biosensors, and the possible impact of our project on the society. We were glad that several attended iGEM teams have teamed up for further collaboration in doing experiments in lab as well as HP investigation across the country, sincerely hoping they will achieve more in their iGEM journey.

OUC-China

Phage infection occurs accidentally not only in the fermentation factories but also in the lab, and it might get worse and worse without appropriate treatment. Therefore, we’d like to dedicate a booklet about prevention, identification, and control of bacteriophage infection. By coincidence, we met team OUC-China in the CCiC whose strain died abnormally in the shaking flask. Having heard our anti-phage project, they wanted to figure out whether they encountered a phage infection. We sent the script of our booklet to them, and they easily checked that the death strain was not caused by phage. Meanwhile, with the feedback of their identification, we together improved the PICP (Prevention, Identification, Control of Phage) booklet, allowing more teams to maintain a phage-free lab environment.