Team:NUS Singapore/Collaborations

NUS iGEM 2019


NANYANG TECHNOLOGICAL UNIVERSITY
About
Together with the NTU-Singapore iGEM team, we hosted a one-day symposium along with the After iGEM event on 19th June 2019. Over 70 high school students and iGEM alumni actively participated in our interactive sessions and sharings. The purpose of this collaboration was to address the lack of opportunities in Synthetic Biology in our current education system through developing meaningful programmes that would bring synthetic biology closer to our local pre-tertiary students. Click here to view our event!
Why did we decide to do this collaboration?
The lack of exposure to Synthetic Biology is a persistent problem in Singapore as high school students are not taught about it in their pre-university years. This could potentially deprive them of opportunities to learn and develop their interest in Synthetic Biology. In 2018, the NUS iGEM team organized a public engagement event named Life Hacks! which was very successful in educating pre-tertiary students about Synthetic Biology. Inspired by their success, our team proposed a similar concept, intended to expand our reach to a bigger community. To maximize our ability to influence the general public, we approached our friendly neighbour, the iGEM team of Nanyang Technological University (NTU) to host and collaborate the event together.
How did we help each other?
Through our frequent meetups and online meetings, we efficiently disseminated flyers to high schools throughout Singapore, invited several high profile professors from different institutes, refined the timeline of events, and successfully rehearsed a dry run. While planning the entire event, we also tried to ensure that all the activities being organised contributed to the goal of raising awareness about synthetic biology and bio-entrepreneurship among students.
What did we learn from this collaboration?
We identified 3 important takeaways from this fruitful collaboration.
  • i) Communication: While presenting our project to a crowd who had just been introduced to Synthetic Biology, we gained some useful insights into adapting our presentation according to the audience. It also allowed us to appreciate and present the bigger picture instead of diving deep into the technical details.
  • ii) Teamwork: Working with NTU made us realise the importance of having a diverse team which consists of people with different perspectives. The entire process of organising the event together with them allowed us to develop the skill of working with people who come from different backgrounds and have a different work style.
  • iii) Bioentrepreneurship: Along with the participants, we also learnt quite a lot from the panel discussion. We better understood the process of translating a technology in the lab into an actual viable business. This was especially relevant to the entrepreneurship aspect of our project as we were now better informed about the relevant important considerations.
UNIVERSITAS INDONESIA
About
Our collaboration with the iGEM team from Universitas Indonesia (UI) mainly revolved around improving the two core aspects of both our projects - Models and Experiments. While their team helped us with protein modelling, we assisted them with the cloning of their gene of interest into a plasmid vector suitable for their chassis.
Why did we decide to do this collaboration?
The UI team’s project this year involved the usage of whole-cell based biosensors to diagnose for Diptheria. Since biosensors are an area in which we wanted to focus our project in, we thought it was very much complementary to our objectives. Furthermore, we had differing strengths - the UI team was able to do protein structure modelling, which would help us understand our systems better, while we had the requisite wet-lab knowledge and equipment to assist them in their own project.
How did we help each other?
Our team, comprising of largely chemical engineers and life science students, were capable of simulating kinetic experiments. But, we were limited in our ability to generate hypotheses about the properties of our selected proteins, in particular the RES-Xre toxin-antitoxin pair. As such, we needed a better understanding of the possible properties of these proteins. Structural modelling is a commonly used method to determine various properties of a protein, such as its degradation rate. We hypothesized that the RES-Xre protein pair behaved similarly to other canonical toxin-antitoxin pairs, in which the antitoxin degrades faster than the toxin. We thus decided to seek the modelling expertise of the UI team to assist us in deducing the stability of each protein. They provided us with a report as linked here, in which they determined that the antitoxin was indeed less stable than the toxin.

Subsequently, the UI team sought our assistance in cloning their gene of interest. Molecular cloning is a common and fundamental technique in synthetic biology, with many different methods used by various groups around the world. The UI team faced difficulties in using their usual method of restriction ligation, and wanted to use an alternative method of cloning. With our expertise in using the Gibson Assembly method of cloning, we assisted them in cloning their gene of interest.

We managed to successfully clone and sequence 1 out of 2 genes they requested our help from. The sequencing result is shown in below (Fig. 1). Eko Ngadiono and Aditya Parawangsa from the UI team came over to visit us and collect the samples, and we exchanged a fruitful discussion on our respective projects, iGEM, and cloning methods.


Fig. 1: Successful sequencing result for pSB1C3+OG with HE clone.

What did we learn from this collaboration?
An important takeaway for our team from this collaboration was an appreciation for the role of joint effort in Synthetic Biology. In addition to an academic collaboration, working together with the UI iGEM team also allowed us to gain insights into the kind of challenges faced by the developing world.
  • i) Collaboration in Synthetic Biology: The very foundation of this field lies in multidisciplinary collaboration and exchange of information. Through this collaboration, both the teams drew on each other’s skill sets in different areas to develop more well-rounded projects.
  • ii) Sharing experiences: Talking to the UI iGEM team offered us with an access to experiences that we lack as a result of staying in a developed country. They allowed us to understand more about the lack of electricity in rural areas and the viability of bioluminescence as a form of lighting. Upon sharing our project with them, they opened our eyes to the possibility of our technology being an alternative to a cold chain in areas with no refrigeration capabilities.