Team:SCU-China/Meetup/CCiC

HUMAN PRACTICE

CCiC

To get better communication and more reliable resources, we attended the 2019 Conference of China iGEMer Community (CCiC) hosted by Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences in Shenzhen. iGEM teams from all over China come to this conference and we got much help and guidance at the duration.

Under the theme of "Synbiopunk", 70 teams from more than 60 universities presented their projects. They combine information technology and biotechnology in a multidisciplinary context, using standard biological modules to build gene circuits and build effective mathematical models to predict, manipulate and measure sophisticated and complex artificial biological systems.

On the purpose of giving more suggestions and feedback to the participating teams, several professors with rich knowledge of synthetic biology and student representatives with many years of experience in iGEM competitions were invited to serve as judges.

This conference also invited professor Ruipeng Lei from Huazhong University of Science and Technology, associate professor Chong Zhang from Tsinghua University, and researchers Fan Jin, Xiaozhou Luo and Tong Si from Shenzhen Advanced Institute of Technology to give special academic reports. Nan Zhang, regional ambassador of the iGEM organizing committee in Asia Shared, discussed the development trend of iGEM in China with participants. Besides, workshops on molecular cloning, quantitative analysis, and computer-aided design were held to provide professional guidance for participants.

When we introduced and presented our project, we attracted people’s attention successfully, many people showed their interest in our project in the panel session and they also gave us some good suggestions.

As usual, CCiC contained keynote speaks, project introductions, panel sessions, poster sessions, special talks, HQ face to face and salons. And at the poster session, we are honored to have lots of teams coming by to have further discussion of our project. We also invited the judge of the organizing committee to offer some guidance and somehow tackle the difficulties we’ve been coming through.

An advisor from XJTLU_China came to our post-session and pointed out some drawbacks of our post that our pathway had some redundant parts such as the pathway concerns 2’,3’-cAMP can be erased or it would be a misleading to other teams and judges.

Concerning our Human Practice, judges said that we need to extrude our highlight, which can be listed as the potential value of biosynthesis cordycepin, the cost comparison of traditional way and biosynthesis way to produce cordycepin. We adopt the suggestion. We do add the comparison of existing ways to produce cordycepin and biosynthesis way, along with the pros and cons analysis, to our Human Practices. Haotian Guo from Paris University suggested that we need to find paper and data as much as possible to support the benefits of cordycepin in therapy, for the lack of popularization may raise questions from judges. And he mentioned we can also build a library of the linker between cns1 and cns2 protein, UTR of the constituent promoter in cns3.

We’ve considered the suggestion of Hantian Guo and made some crucial improvements to our project. We genuinely mention the value of cordycepin, but our main purpose lies in the flying high prices of cordycepin and we intend to change such condition. So, the benefits of cordycepin in therapy will not be in our major concern. As for the library mentioned before, we’ve already been working on that. First, we search the relevant papers and find some regularly-used linker. Then we need to use modeling to go through all the linkers that we’ve found and conduct preliminary screening. We’re still working on that.

We received some advice in our design as well. Students from SYSU_China asked us how we test the expression level of cns1 and cns2, and we told them we linked the yeGFP to them, and test it in Escherichia coli. They suggested that we should translate the recombined plasmids into the yeast we used for the difference in the growth curve and expression system. They also pointed out that we could design some co-factors for our other steps of synthesis, which should be a convenience for the testing work and reach the purpose of semiquantitative determination.

After CCiC, we still keep in touch with many teams we met in the meeting, such as DUT_China, NJTech_China, XJTLU_China. DUT_China asked as if we can do some cell tests for them and we also shared their project with our team.

In CCiC, we showed our project in many ways, by speech, poster and introduction. And so did other teams. So, we could learn from other teams how to present our project better and make it more attractive. Generally speaking, CCiC is an excellent opportunity for us to communicate with other iGEMers and improve our project. What’s more, it has greatly promoted the development of synthetic biology and iGEM in China.