Team:Tianjin/Collaborations
Joint Video Shooting
In order to popularize synthetic biology scientifically and enhance public interest and understanding in this field. This year, iGEM-Tianjin contacted a number of teams in China to introduce various "the world of microbes" to popular science by means of interesting videos. Cooperation allows us to take advantage of the strengths of each laboratory and the familiar microbes, and expand the way to promote communication. We believe that this will be a meaningful and interesting propaganda activity for science popularization. It will also be a team cooperation activity that gathers the strength of various teams and utilizes their respective strengths and professional fields.
Through the great efforts of our partners and team members, the "The world of Microorganism" joint video was finally successfully completed and released online. Our joint video is freely available on the home page of YouTube and Bilibili (a popular Chinese video sharing website) and has received a lot of attention and praise.
As the initiator and organizer of the Joint Video Project, we believe that teams should not only cooperate with each other to overcome experimental difficulties, but also unite the iGEM community and call on everyone to actively participate in popular science work. Thanks to all the teams involved, together with us, we have painted a colorful "world of microorganism" for the public.
Sixth Conference of China iGEMer Community (CCiC)
From August 19th to 23, Tianjin-iGEMers took part in the sixth CCiC conference and entered the venue of synbiopunk, which is located in the Institute of synthetic biology, Institute of advanced technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences. From more than 60 colleagues colleges, more than 70 teams and two biomod teams, including past champion teams, they demonstrated the ingenious projects and shared valuable experience. We were inspired by the exciting and colorful collision at the conference. We also introduced to WHU-China, JNU-China, CPU-China and other teams our idea of shooting a joint popular science video of "depicting the world of bacteria", which received positive responses from the teams.
The CCiC conference was a drill for iGEM to participate in the competition. We gave the judges a comprehensive account of our events and communicated with other participants in the exhibition.
Participating in CCIC Conference, we have harvested suggestions and help:
Better to make the project more synthetic biology.
Better to incorporate more engineering ideas into the project.
We adjust the project according to feedback:
Reflections on improving "chromosome stabilizing element group" by engineering method.
Introducing "single base editor" to enrich the connotation of synthetic biology.
Fifth Forum of Young Scholars in Synthetic Biology
From 17 to 18 in August, the representative of iGEM-Tianjin was invited to participate in the fifth forum of synthetic biology for young scholars in Tianjin. At the meeting, we listened to Professor Nathan J.Hillson, Professor Yingjin Yuan, and made speeches on major breakthroughs in the field of synthetic biology. An excellent introduction to progress. Participation in the "Young Scholars Forum on Synthetic Biology" broadened our horizons, enabled us to have a deeper understanding of the frontier progress of synthetic biology, and began to think more deeply about how our project can affect the world.
As a few iGEM team invited to participate, we also introduced the second year's presentation on our project this year and the ongoing work. Our earnest and modest attitude was unanimously praised by the judges and eventually won the "best poster" award.
Collaboration With Other Team
With NEU_CHINA 
What have we done for them
To investigate the specific factors that affect the kill switch, the NEU-China team mapped the growth curves of E.coli at 16℃ and 37℃ when three different plasmids were introduced. The difference of these plasmids could cause changes on bacterial population, and it was analyzed by mathematical modeling we built.
Each factor was named: time as x1, plasmid pCold as x2, plasmid pcold-MazF as x3, plasmid pCold+PET-MazE as x4. Through the analysis of the data, the formula under 37℃ is
and the formula under 16℃ is
The R2 value of both formulas is greater than 0.98, indicating that the equation has a very high fitting degree. The greater the coefficient value of the variable in the equation, the greater the influence degree of the factor on the final result.
Then we performed chi-square test on the relevant data of the kill switch, and the results showed that there was a significant relationship between kill switch and temperature under the condition of confidence interval of 97.5%. Suggestions for improvement are also made. For example, in addition to OD value, other methods should be used to express the change of bacterial population. Suggestions for improvement are also made. For example, in addition to OD value, other methods should be used to express the change of bacterial population.
What have they done for us
NEU_CHINA helped us to do the market research on lycopene, including cost, raw material consumption, industrial production process and so on. We realized that the lycopene market still has huge potential and the space for strain optimization, so we had the idea that we could use Saccharomyces cerevisiae which assembled the lycopene production gene and Yarrowia lipolytica to conduct double optimization on hybrid cells.
With MIT
During the project, we also got a friendship from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Leonardo Zornberg ,a graduate student at MIT in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering ,who has seen our work in 2016 iGEM competition and wanted to use it. We gladly and patiently offered him help and sent him the plasmid atlas he needed. Afterwards he thanked us for our patient help, and we were glad that our work had helped him.
The plasmid atlas of PETase that we send to Leonardo
Through this communication, we once again felt the charm of the iGEM contest participated by teams from all over the world and the significance and role of the open source and sharing of iGEM components. We hope that our work can be applied to a variety of meaningful work, and we also sincerely hope that our work can make any contributions to other research .
There are emails between Leonardo Zornberg and us.
With TJUSLS_CHINA
It is brilliant to have a partner team in the same school. Although our project themes differ, some steps are same, for example, PCR. We visited each other’s laboratory and discussed some difficulties in the experiment, both technically and metrologically. And since they have completed most of their experiments in September, however, we have a lot of overlapping work to do, they assist to help them construct a gene sequence.
We have provided tjusls-china with four DNA fragments, namely, RFP left, RFP HPH, RFP RFP RFP, RFP right, all the primers needed for overlap PCR and the corresponding PCR program. Tjusls-china successfully constructed 2K fragment of right HPH for us, but the complete 4K fragment was not obtained.