Team:Vilnius-Lithuania/Human Practices
Human practices
Team-building
We started our journey to Boston in mid-January when the new team of Vilnius-Lithuania iGEM gathered. The first team forming activity under informal direction umbrella took place in mid-February when the whole team had a workshop on team dynamics and conflict management. The workshop was led by a professional facilitator and consultant on strategy management Mrs. Eglė Daunienė, an Associate Professor of Vilnius University, and was mainly focused on the formation of the team at different stages of its development.
Everyone was asked to name 'my why' – the purpose of joining the team and expectations for the following year. This exercise is designed to make everyone feel the freedom to express their ideas and accept positive and negative feedback.
Another focus point of the workshop was team roles. Each team member was provided with the theoretical descriptions of four role areas: 1) interpersonal roles; 2) informational roles; 3) analytical roles; 4) acting roles.
Finally, we were told what problems may arise and what are the ordinary stages of a winning team. Team members were introduced to Tuckman's stages of group development: Forming, storming, norming, and performing.
Read more in our Team Building Handbook (padaryti hyperlinka)
Implementations:
- Understanding of Tuckman's model at the very beginning of our team forming stages helped a lot in the future. One of the most important aspects was realizing that storming is a normal and even crucial stage of successful team development. However, if solved right, each conflict leads to an improvement in working. It is essential to understand that the storming stage comes to each team, and the worst choice is to ignore it. In our group, we had a rather long storming phase, understanding principles of team development helped us not to avoid conflicts but form healthy team relationships from the early beginning.
- The mapping of our team interpersonal role matrix showed that we have all types of people in our team, which turns out to be the best possible composition of the team, aiming to achieve common goals.
- Therefore, Vilnius-Lithuania 2019 iGEM team was able to reach the peak of performing during autumn. We now know how to use everyone's potential, and this has lead to completing our project the best way we could.
Strategic plan preparation
One of our first meetings in iGEM was with members of our long-term sponsors – Thermo Fisher Scientific Baltics. During the session, we were encouraged to make a strategic plan for a year, as it would help us to better coordinate work and follow our progress.
After the meeting, we were introduced to Senior Business Excellence Manager Evelina Čirbaitė, who told us about the methods and philosophy implemented in Thermo Fisher Scientific. She also taught us about the X-Matrix, Lean Tools, Lean Management, and A3 Management.
Read more in our Strategic Plan Handbook (hyperlink.)
Implementations:
- After the meeting, our team prepared this year's plan.
- Our meetings were made more structured.
- We started filling a weekly plan and a progress table.
Forming Vilnius-Lithuania iGEM 2019 team
At the beginning of 2019, a group of students was selected by Vilnius-Lithuania 2018 iGEM team. This happens every year – the last year's team prepares a questionnaire and runs an interview session to choose new members from various disciplines, including math, computer science, politics, medicine, and, of course, biology and biochemistry. This is because every Vilnius-Lithuania iGEM team was, is, and will be entirely student-run and diverse, and we consider this our biggest strength. The PI, instructors, advisors, and anything else the team needs are selected during the year and depend on the project's main idea and the help needed.
Receiving good practices from previous Vilnius-Lithuania iGEM teams
The first month of the newly assembled students was dedicated mostly to meeting with the participants of the previous year's competition and learning from them as much as possible about iGEM in general, idea development, marketing strategies, PR, and other smaller, but crucial, things. Without these talks, we would not have been able to navigate during the first few months.
Implementations:
- The team decided to spend January gathering knowledge about synthetic biology and other iGEM projects, only then progressively move on to generating the idea. This meant studying from the edX course "Principles of Synthetic biology" and reading the most recent articles in the field of synthetic biology.
- During our weekly meetings, we presented the best iGEM projects to each other and discussed them to learn about the types of projects and what can be done in a year.
- The new team agreed to organize Biohackathon for the second time.
- We were recommended to do team-building with the help of professionals.
- Members with no previous experience got accustomed to the working discipline and tempo that a competitive iGEM team requires.
Prof. Rolandas Meškys
Because we wanted to work with metagenomics and create systems that would help in various areas of biology, including biocatalysis, our team reached out to Professor Rolandas Meškys, the head of the Department of Molecular Microbiology and Biotechnology in Life Sciences Center.
Prof. Meškys encouraged us to follow through with this idea as it is a growing field with huge potential. He asked about the applications of optogenetics in bacteria, and while discussing it, we came up with a way to apply light-inducible bacterial systems in cancer therapy. We postulated that this would allow treatment to be surgically non-invasive by allowing highly precise therapeutic protein release inside the tumor.
The professor also suggested not to limit ourselves with the search of new possible tools, but also, by applying rational design, develop optogenetic tools from known proteins.
Since Prof. Meškys had such great insight, we asked him to take the role of our Principal Investigator, and he gladly accepted. Vilnius-Lithuania 2019 iGEM team feels very proud to have such an established member of the academia as our PI.
Implementations:
- Together we came up with the Idea of application - light inducible bacterial systems in cancer therapy.
- Decided not only work with inventions of new optogenetics tools but also apply similar optogenetic systems that are already known.
- We welcomed our new PI
Dr. Darius Kazlauskas
We had a meeting with Dr. Darius Kazlauskas, who is a scientist working with in silico metagenomics. In one of his projects, he tried to assemble viral genomes from various metagenomic datasets. He worked with Ebi-metagenomics, IMG/M, iMicrobe.us. However, he had problems with the biggest metagenomic database MG-RAST, which stores more than ten times more information than all the other databases together.
According to him, there are massive problems with some databases, especially MG-RAST, as the data is not structured. Moreover, data storage and analysis requires enormous amounts of system resources and advanced expertise in the field. Therefore, we decided to work further with the MG-RAST database for gene mining of novel optogenetic tools. We made an aim to open up this metagenomic database for scientists with no prior IT knowledge and to provide a means to develop new parts in synthetic biology.
Implementations:
- Decided to work with MG-RAST
Thermo Fisher Scientific Baltic
It is essential to gather as many different opinions as possible, and what can be more different than business and academia. Our team wanted to find out about the potential applications and marketability of our project from the business point of view. So we organized a meeting with Dr. Remigijus Skirgaila, a scientist from Thermo Fisher Scientific, and his colleague Dainius Tautvaišas, an iGEM judge, who helped to organize this meeting and often provided our team with general consulting.
Team members were pleased to hear that optogenetics might be the key to make the regulation of bacteria easier. Dr. Skirgaila saw our project as being technically implementable, as well. We also learned that as far as they know, bacterial control is only possible at the transcriptional level.
Moreover, they were very interested in our metagenomic sequences mining software. They told us that we should seek the development of this software thoroughly as it would open up a possibility to access a considerable amount of data. They also suggested to do a cloud-based system and to contact with cloud offering companies such as Google.
Implementations after a meeting:
- We understood that in silico metagenomic mining has considerable potential.
- Our team contacted Google to receive a cloud for performing computations.
- We started to discuss the possibility of control not only at the transcriptional but also at the translational level.
- The team started to think of ways to make our project more marketable.
Student for one day
Vilnius-Lithuania 2019 iGEM team participated in the Vilnius University event Student for One Day. During this event, we not only presented our project and synthetic biology in general but also included some practical tasks.
High school students were given a chance to do some laboratory work and at the same time, learn about the methods and principles of biotechnology. They performed an experiment to incorporate urease into alginate capsules and then used these capsules to detect urea. This way, they learned that urease hydrolyzed urea to ammonia and carbon dioxide and were able to gain an understanding of indirect measuring methods (in this case, change in pH to detect urea). This was applied to estimate water pollution in various samples.
After the practical tasks, the students split into groups to participate in a synthetic biology quiz, which further deepened their understanding of possible biotechnology applications. Their final exercise was to think of a real-world implementation of our light controlled bacterial system (as our team members were explaining the mechanism of the system before, they skipped this part on purpose). Real iGEM participants blended with the student teams to act out a brainstorming and idea pitching session. And even though students regarded the task as challenging, they were able to create genuinely original ideas. The most imaginative idea was about a bacterial strain that could be used for repairing buildings. As light penetrated slits in a ruptured brick, it would activate a response in bacteria for secreting appropriate substances, thus fixing the break.
Implementations:
- Simple, practical exercises attracted the pupil’s attention when explaining biotechnology methods and presenting synthetic biology. Therefore, we included more practical experiments to explain theoretical principles in our future presentations.
International Conference The COINS 2019
Both 2018 and 2019, Vilnius-Lithuania iGEM teams participated in an international conference of life sciences The COINS. Here we attended company fair and made both oral and poster presentations of the 2018 Vilnius-Lithuania iGEM team project.
More than 300 students attended the presentation to hear about iGEM competition and synthetic biology. This presentation was the very first from Vilnius-Lithuania iGEM 2018 to our local community after they had come back from Boston.
The attention of participants was captured not only by the last year's but also by the current team. New iGEM participants were reaching out to potential sponsors, mentors, communicating with interested members of the academia.
Most importantly, our team had an exclusive opportunity to talk with the Nobel prize laureate in Physiology or Medicine in 2014, Prof. John O'Keefe, and hear the story of his life, research, as well as the path of becoming such an esteemed member of the scientific community. He talked passionately about the importance of interdisciplinary thinking, especially philosophy, and not giving up when it seems rough.
Because Prof. O'Keefe is a neuroscientist with a background in engineering, he was able to point out the benefits of implementing engineering principles while working with biological systems. This was important to us, as we were already thinking of working with optogenetics, the start of which is also closely related to neuroscience.
Also, we took the professor's advice on interdisciplinarity, and every time we organized an event, we tried to invite as intellectually diverse people as possible (for example, we asked the philosopher Dr. Jonas Čiurlionis, to participate in our discussion on the future of humanity and technology).
International Biology Olympiad
Vilnius-Lithuania 2019 iGEM team did not miss a chance to help students preparing for the International Biology Olympiad. We organized a practical work activity based on Practical Paper 2 from the 2015 International Biology Olympiad. (Hyperlink)
During the practice, students performed standard lab procedures, such as PCR, restriction analysis, and gel electrophoresis. The experimental work required critical thinking and previous knowledge as the participants had to choose the required temperature, restriction enzymes, and primers. When they finally got the results, they learned how to interpret them and make the right conclusions.
After the experiments, we examined the main mistakes. Then we showed tips and tricks preparing reaction mixtures for PCR and restriction analysis and together discussed the results. Afterward, the students were introduced to iGEM competition, synthetic biology, explained to why and how the principles of engineering and Boolean logic are used in the process of creating a genetically modified organism. Moreover, we invited them to join the competition during their studies at Vilnius University!
Prof. E. Sužiedėlienė and Dr. Justas Dapkūnas
Our team met Dr. Justas Dapkūnas, who works in the field of bioinformatics as a researcher in the analysis of protein structure, surface properties, and interactions. We reasoned that by using bioinformatic tools, we could predict a DNA sequence that a protein of interest could bind to.
However, team members heard from Dr. Dapkūnas that this sort of protein structure modeling is a possible but extremely challenging task. The first difficulty stems from the fact that sometimes completely unrelated protein bind to the same DNA sequences, and other times homologous protein bind to entirely different DNA sequences. Secondly, it could be possible to predict the DNA sequence by docking a very closely related protein with a known structure to genomic DNA from the organism the protein of interest comes from. However, this method would not be possible, as our protein sequences would be gathered from metagenomic databases.
After this conversation with Dr. Dapkūnas, we understood that we would not be able to find the needed DNA sequence in silico and would have to find them by performing in vitro experimentation. Therefore, we asked Prof. Edita Sužiedėlienė to give us a piece of advice. She suggested performing double-stranded SELEX (Systematic evolution of ligands by exponential enrichment). This approach started by expressing our protein of interest fused with an affinity tag in E. coli. The next step would be immobilization of the protein on beads and bringing double-stranded chemically synthesized random nucleotide containing oligonucleotides. Professor Sužiedėlienė warned that the assay might be noisy; therefore, we should be prepared to optimize the conditions as much as possible.
Implementations:
- We understood that finding DNA binding sites in silico would be too challenging. Therefore, we decided to use in vitro method.
- We used the double-stranded SELEX method to find the protein binding sites of the undescribed protein of our research.
Irmantas Rokaitis
We decided that the best approach for searching for the protein binding sequence in DNA would be running five cycles of SELEX followed by EMSA (Electrophoretic Mobility Shift Assay) to separate the oligonucleotides that attach to the protein and those that do not. However, standard EMSA requires a radioactively labeled DNA sequence.
Irmantas Rokaitis is an MSc Student of biochemistry, currently working with the EMSA technique. As he has been a member of two previous iGEM teams, we decided to invite Irmantas to discuss lab safety. He told us that ordering radioactively labeled nucleotides is only possible under specific circumstances. He also said that if we were able to get everything needed, we should find a lab space that is suitable for this sort of work and meets all the requirements.
As an alternative to radioactively labeled nucleotides, he suggested us to use fluorescent-labeled DNA. Even though it has a lower sensitivity, it would be a much safer alternative.
Implementations:
- We settled on using fluorescent-labeled DNA for our following experiments instead of radioactively labeled nucleotides.
