Team:SJTU-BioX-Shanghai/Collaborations
Introduction
While enjoying independent competition process inside the team, we also love to collaborate with other teams. For us, iGEM is more than a game, it is the place where all the people who love synthetic biology begin their friendship.
Click their team logo to go directly to see our collaboration.
High School
SUIS_Shanghai
Mutual help is a great spirit of iGEM. As a team of college students, we are honored to guide high school students from Shanghai United International School, Wanyuan Campus to do some experiments. This year, they aim to engineer a strain of natural lactic acid bacteria capable of providing immunity against KHV. The working of the two systems Iron QS and cell surface display would enable the expression of KHV antigen in Koi’s gut, iron poor environment, when reaching considerable cell density inside. A membrane protein of KHV-ORF81-is expressed and anchored to the cell wall of the engineered bacterium. We assisted them in measuring florescence to test if iron QS really works. At the same time, we help them use SDS-PAGE and western blotting for the exact separation and subsequent analysis of proteins. In the experimental interval, members from two teams also talked about projects and exchanged helpful opinions.
Click HEREto see SUIS_Shanghai’s collaboration page
Undergraduate
Fudan & Fudan-TSI
Zinc finger is vital to our project. On iGEM's part registry page, we found a part containing zinc finger, but it was not included in the kit. We tried to contact Fudan and they responded enthusiastically.After searching and cultivating, 2019 Fudan-TSI and iGEM 2019 Fudan shared P58-pML2-EGFP-P2A-ZF21-16-KRAB and P60-pML2-EGFP-P2A-ZF43-8-KRAB to us. Besides that, when we talked about the false positive reactions that occurred repeatedly during experiment, the team leader of Fudan recommended homologous recombination, which did play a big role in the later stage of our project. After further communication, we learned that Fudan intend to remold E.coli Nissle1917 to provide a universal platform for intestinal metabolic disease treatment, and are glad to provide cell ht29 to them.
Click HERE to see Fudan & Fudan-TSI’s collaboration page
NEU_CHINA
This year, NEU_CHINA uses genetically engineered Escherichia coli to relief symptoms of Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD). They engineered E.coli strain to precisely colonize in the inflammatory region; successfully express and secrete anti-inflammatory proteins. We love their project and are glad to give our plasmid which contain PyeaR. They use this as the promoter of NO sensor, and had verified that it can be activated by NO.
Click HERE to see NEU_CHINA’s collaboration page
Peking
After design, we realized that split luciferase and dCas9 play an important role in our project. Finding luciferase is a process of twists and turns. Fortunately, when we looked through previous wikis, we found that Peking had conducted relevant experiments. Peking quickly replied to us. They not only shared their previous part part BBa_K1689009 and BBa_K1689010, but also gave us some useful tips on using part tools. We use Nluc-dCas9 and changed the C-luciferase to be linked to zinc finger. With their great help, our project can continue to go smoothly.
Click HERE to see Peking’s collaboration page
SJTU-software
SJTU-software is also our friend.
Because of the convenience of same school, we maintained a close relationship throughout the competition. As a team based on wetlab, we use part tools frequently. So we pointed out some existing problems of the part tools to SJTU-software as a feedback. These suggestions serve as a source of inspiration for their improved part tools. As a software team, SJTU-software also played their advantage. They provided us with great help in the design and layout of wiki. What’s more, they also introduced some useful database tools to us, in order to facilitate the alignment of certain special sequences. Beyond the project, we exchanged feelings on the progress, key points of presentation, and skills of communication.
Click HERE to see SJTU-software’s collaboration page
Tongji_China
This year, we still keep close contact with our friend Tongji_China. In 2019, they worked on bio-indigo/indican synthesis and explored the possibility of commercialization . We held a meeting at campus. After introducing this year’s projects, both of us got a lot of feedback about certain aspects to focus on for the wetlab design of the project. Although our project is not directly related, we faced similar problems when doing experiments. (seems that we are men in the same boat). After introduction, we focused on the experiments, such as how to achieve electrical transformation, overlapping PCR and shared various methods that have been tried previously.We provided them with the consideration of the parameter settings when making linear segment rotation. And to our delight, they optimized their parameter settings according to our help, and finally completed the experiment.In addition, we also talked about HP's work, and funny stories in the process of the project. We are looking forward to our meetup at jamboree this year!
Click HERE to see Tongji_China’s collaboration page
Tsinghua
In our information storage device, the addition of inducer is input signal, which can activate corresponding promotor. Thus, the expression of Cas1/2 can lead to spacer acquisition. We figure AHL is a desired inducer, for it can be triggered by off-target incidence. So, we need a pluxR promotor upstream of Cas1-Cas2 complex.
After reaching out to iGEM19_Tsinghua, they kindly shipped their quorum sensing positive feedback plasmid to us, which contains luxpR-HS promotor. Interestingly, the shipment was delayed for 2 days, for Typhoon Lekima. We were worried and freezing cold. Well, luckily the plasmid survived and was successfully transformed.Using this as backbone, Gibson assembly with Cas1/2 was carried out to construct our pLux-Cas.
Click HERE to see Tsinghua’s collaboration page
iGEM Community
CCiC 2019
We are also involved in the conference of China iGEMer Community, one of the largest festivals for Chinese iGEMers.
This year, the conference was guided by the Chinese Society of Bioengineering Synthetic Biology Professional Committee and co-sponsored by the Institute of Synthetic Biology, Institute of Synthetic Biology, Shenzhen Institute of Synthetic Biology, Shenzhen Institute of Advanced Technology, and the CCiC Executive Committee. Also co-organized by the Synthetic Biology Committee of the Chinese Society of Bioengineering and the Shenzhen Synthetic Biology Association.
During the consortium, we gave a preliminary demonstration of our project, introduced the design thought of our project, and explained the design concept of gene loop in our project.
We also learned about the project design of other teams in the post session, and also received questions and suggestions from different teams on our project. In the communication with them, we also carried out further upgrading and transformation of our project.
The 5th Synthetic Biology Young Scholar Forum (SynBioYSF)
This year, our team took part in The 5th Synthetic Biology Young Scholar Forum hosted by Tianjin Institute of Industial Biotechnology, Chinese Academy of Science, on August 16-18. This forum was a grand meeting of prominent researchers in synthetic biology all over China and there were also many delegates from foreign institutes. During the forum, we learned about new advances in various fields of synthetic biology presented by professional scholars, including those concerning agriculture，environment，genome synthesis, etc. We've also got a chance to give a presentation of the main idea of our team's project and part of our results and answered questions from the audience. Our project was thought to be innovative and we also gained some valuable advice from the experts, which inspired us of possible further improvement in off-target detection. More importantly, we met with iGEM team members from Tianjin, TJUSLS, Tsinghua-A and OUC. Not only did each team shared their project ideas with the others, but we also discussed and exchanged experience in lab skills as well as in human practice and in team development and management.
Interlab
This year, CCiC community encouraged teams to test the effectiveness of Gibson assembly. We participated with doubt, because our cloning experiments were truly unsatisfying. Using the designated product, GenBuilderᵀᴹ Cloning Kit: L00701 from Genescript, we cloned Cas1-Cas2 complex into the pluxR plasmid backbone, with a positive rate around 60％.
Every participant is required to submit pictures and information of two tests and two positive and negative controls.
After this, we sincerely recommend iGEM groups using Gibson assembly instead of traditional digestion and ligation method, for Gibson works faster and more efficiently.
SJTU-BioX-Shanghai
Contact us: sjtuigem@gmail.com
Bio-X Institute, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Dongchuan Rd. 800