After presenting the brief idea of our project, we got a useful suggestion that we should point out where do we get the scoring matrix

Through this meetup, we got some suggestions from teachers. The most impressive one is that because of the limitation of time, we may not able to make every part to be perfect, but we can lay emphasis on a certain aspect and make this aspect to be as good as possible. With this suggestion, we adjusted our plan about our software, and finally decided that enzyme is the most important part in our project.

In order to further investigate the project, with the help of our PI Fei Jian, we contacted the teacher of microbiology in East China University of Science and Technology. We introduced our project to the teacher, who was also interested in iGEM and our project content, so we had a very deep communication with the teacher. The suggestions from the teacher are as follows.

On enzyme optimization, they honestly told us that each enzyme optimization was able to be a project, so it was hard to find a general method for all enzymes, but we can consult some teachers major in biochemistry, maybe they had some ideas about it. Although we didn’t get a specific method from GENEWIZ, they gave us some suggestions about scoring those enzymes. From gene synthesizing, their production department gave us some deduction items, the most typical of which was some sequences in certain species like E. coli were difficult to synthesize in the productive process.

The second presentation mainly introduced the status of bioinformatics in life science, the functions of bioinformatics in iGEM and how to use the knowledge of bioinformatics to construct a software about synthetic biology in iGEM. This presentation made us have a new understanding of bioinformatics, and understand the application of bioinformatics in synthetic biology. Meanwhile, in the process of preparing, we also organized the construction of software，to prepare for the later construction of software.
Firstly, we raised questions and divided these questions into parts, then we read related literature and discussed about the solutions, and in the process of finding solutions, we collected and cleared up useful data, built models to solve it, and we set up visual platform to make abstract problems more concrete. The interesting combination of codes in bioinformatics attracted students to join in the study of bioinformatics. The participation of software teams in iGEM competition also makes them see the wide application of bioinformatics and more motivated for them to learn.
At the same time, in this presentation, we raised a question to the students about how to do the sequence alignment, and some of them thought that we can do the alignment from the beginning or the end of the sequences. Although the students didn’t take many aspects into consideration, their different opinions on the same question inspired us to continue to try different algorithms, continuously optimize.