Team:XHD-WS-Wuhan-A/Collaborations
Collaboration
Our team XHD-WS-Wuhan A actively cooperated with other teams in the IGEM competition in 2019. We have established friendly relations with Worldshaper-Wuhan, XHD-WS-Wuhan B and HZAU-China. In addition, we also participated in a Meet up event which were jointly organized by Hangzhou high-school teams. These intra-provincial and extra-provincial cooperation have helped us and other teams to better complete our projects.
1. Projects Presenting and Experience Sharing
On July 5,Four members(Du Rongrong, Huang Kexin, Shen Shiqing, and Xiao Jingxuan) from our team(XHD-WS-Wuhan A) have attended a collaboration with Team XHD-WS-Wuhan B, Team Worldshaper-wuhan and Team HZAU－China at the Huazhong Agricultural University.
The primary goal of this cooperation is to introduce every team’s project content, present progress, and ensure that we could play deep corporations in the project design and experiments among different teams. These necessary steps gives a solid foundation to the next meetup.
The cooperation went on well, we received many help and inspirations from other teams: HZAU－China. simply introduced some basic content and method about mathematical modeling.Worldshaper-Wuhan gives us their preliminary conception about hardware design; XHD-WS-Wuhan－B always stayed with us and decided to keep in touch all the time.
On the other hand, after presenting that our research target was gastric cancer, and the whole design was based on miRNA, the leader of HZAU－China Xichen Rao expressed great interests in our project and told us their team had already accumulated some experience and knowledge. Although it’s not related to their 2019 IGEM project this year, they still promised that if we encounter some technical or experimental problems, they could offer us some help. This brings great encouragement and confidence to our team.
The group photo of four Wuhan teams in the cooperation HZAU
2. The Cooperation Of Projects and Experiments
Based on the first cooperation and program sharing activities, the team of Huazhong Agricultural University helped our team in many technical details.
First, Huazhong Agricultural University gave us the detailed operation manual of molecular cloning experiment, which contained much technical experience. This valuable experience helped us to get ideal experimental results.
Most of all, we appreciate them for the assistance that when we met difficulties doing the characterization experiment, they chose a part for us based on our experimental platform merits.
We carefully investigated our IGEM kit from the committee in order to find the plasmid which would be used in characterization. we picked up 5 samples and proceeded according to the standard instruction. However, we failed to receive the proper results, so we turned to HZAU－China for assistance.
After listening to our difficulties, they proposed a possible cause: the plasmids in the kit may be false positive, so the best way to do the characterization was to find the component from the component library in the past few years and reconstruct the plasmid in order to determine the function。After discussing with HZAU-China, we finally chose two Parts: BBa_J01008 and K2771000 to implement characterization. In addition, They also helped us design primers and sequences that successfully constructed plasmids for these two components.
Collaboration with XHD-WS-Wuhan-B
Our team interacted with XHD-WS-Wuhan B and Worldshaper-wuhan closely throughout iGEM 2019. We peer viewed each other’ s safety form and gave feedback.
Collaboration with Worldshaper-Wuhan
When Worldshaper-Wuhan was in the process of characterization (the part number is Part: BBa_K1106004 and its name is GFP generator under Ars Promoter), they encountered difficulties in configuring the arsenic solution. We helped them find out required information and design the arsenic solution configuration scheme. Because Xiao Jinxuan, a laboratory personnel in our team, possessed strong experimental skills, she assisted Worldshaper-Wuhan in completing the experiment of constructing process and determining the function of the plasmid.
Meet up in Hangzhou
On August 2, our team, XHD－WS－Wuhan-A, was invited to a meet up in Hangzhou.
Five members of our team including the team leader attended this high-school IGEM meet up.
Photo2: the group photo of all the IGEM teams which came to the Meetup in Hangzhou
Photo3: Our team members were carefully listening to the introduction presented by the special guests
This Meet up was primarily divided into two parts in order to simulate the on-site reply of Giant Jamboree: PPT reply and poster presentation.
With the announcement of the formal beginning, we imitated the meeting of Giant Jamboree which would take place in Boston, helping us perform better and find the flaws in our presentation. After the presentation was over, the chairs made their own review, gave us many useful suggestions, and even provided some help:
1. Professor Bin Zhu introduced his formal student Chao Chen to us. Doc Chen is a famous Oncologist and he had made some research related to our program. We really appreciated this opportunity and future interview would be arranged.
2. Some judges gave us some suggestions about our presentation design: we should give up some background introduction in order to control our presentation time; we should also pay attention to the introducing sequence, trying to give a story which can grab audience’s interests.
3. Our questionnaire had some flaws too: our questionnaire design was a little bit bias because we focused on collecting professional suggestions too more. The possible improvement included giving two Questionnaire, professional one and common one. In this way, our investigation would be more persuasive and inclusive.
4. One judge pointed out that our detection method was lack of practice element, which will be hard to carry out if it comes to use, but he also told us this problem reach the barrier of the entire medical community, so we should focus on improving the basis and design of our program for now.
Photo4: Our team is presenting the protocol and design of our program using the powerpoint.
Photo5: Our team is introducing our program during the poster exhibition.
On August 3, we practiced the poster meeting. Judges came around and asked for the crucial introduction just like what they do in the Giant Jamboree. Our poster had been through careful preparation, so the poster exhibition went on well. Like what happened yesterday, judges also gave us some valuable suggestions:
1. We had the fastest progress among high school teams, so one way to improve is to add more integrated human practice, like collaboration with other teams or host a meet up like this in our own city.
2. Every member in the team should be totally familiar with the poster’s content.
3. One judge suggested us to start an investigation over the patients to see if they have any worry or concern about our program. If they provide some useful questions, we can make improvement accordingly to make our program acceptable to t patients.
4. Our gene-pathway image was a little bit humble, which may result in misunderstanding among audience. As a result, we need to create a more precise and complete model to be presented.
Address
XHD-WS-Wuhan-A
Wuhan High School
No.538,Gongxiu Road,Xiaoshan District,
Wuhan,Hubei Province,China