Team:Fudan/Collaborations

2018 iGEM Team:Fudan - Collaborations

Collaborations

Collaborations

Working together, Team:Fudan-CHINA

Assembled around the same time and representing the same university, we have since built a strong and cooperative relationship. We, Team:Fudan, and Team:Fudan-CHINA, have always been on a fantastic and harmonious journey together, aiding each other and providing useful feedbacks whenever we met or discussed. We frequently shared our plasmids and reagents to them, and also provided them with immediate help on experiments including cell culture, fluorescent imaging, and flow cytometry. Vice versa, they assisted us on the interLab, especially on the plate reader.

With common interests, Team:NAU-CHINA

As Team:NAU-CHINA in Nanjing found out that we had parts Part:BBa_K2549061, Part:BBa_K2549062 that they could use to build their genetic circuits. They reached out to us, and we gladly provided them with these plasmids with detailed sequence information and instructions on how to use them. The parts we provided were ultimately very effective in constructing and testing their signal transduction system. The parts and the plasmids containing them are listed below:

Part:BBa_K2549061LaG16 with mNotch1 extented core region and tTA, which we have tested and characterized in 2017.

Part:BBa_K2549062: surface EGFP (surEGFP), which we used as one of our antigens against the SynNotch receptor. We have also characterized surEGFP in 2017.

☺ Manufacturing and distributing, Team:OUC-China

Sharing a similar idea on how to promote basic science, Team:OUC-China and we, Team:Fudan, both wanted to provide a visual and entertaining way for people to understand synthetic biology. We took different approaches toward this mutual goal. They created a comic book on theories and technologies of synthetic biology. And we helped promote synthetic biology by hosting a Bio-Art display and propagating our ENABLE project and synthetic biology at the school fair, in both of which we distributed and displayed their book to grab the interest of the audience.

Surprise visits, Team:USTC

When our teammates went to USTC to visit their high school friends who studies there in July, they contacted the USTC iGEM team at impromptu. Received with enthusiasm, our teammates happily shared our ENABLE project design with them. The USTC iGEM team gave us a thorough introduction on their lab and project. Later in August, one of their team member also surprised us with his presence in Shanghai, so we delightfully gave him a campus and lab tour in return. We also had an in-depth project communication at CCiC.

Jumpstart, high school Team:Nanjing_NFLS

As it is the first time for them to participate in the iGEM competition, we provided them with many advice including how to conduct their experiment to the criteria of judges and parts documentation. We first explained our interpretation of things they were unclear about. In order to offer further help to them, we learnt about their project abstract and design through frequent mails. We further discussed with them on parts improvement and documentation. We explained to them what is parts improvement, listed examples of it and told them how it can be done. Moreover, in parts documentation, we examined their parts and provided recommendation on how to present parts in a more standardized way. Hopefully their documentation of parts will be very informative and they'll do well in part improvement.

Our cornerstone, Team:Tsinghua

Holding a long-standing friendship with Team:Tsinghua, we made extensive discussions over Internet. When we met at CCiC, we exchanged a myriad of ideas covering project design, human practice, team management and so on. By the way, they gave us valuable suggestions on our poster design.

Heading south, the iGEM EuroAsian Meetup

We participated in the iGEM EuroAsian Meetup, which was from July 24th to 26th, hosted by Team:TUDelft and Team:BGIC-Global in Shenzhen. This July trip was our first opportunity to share our ENABLE project internationally. The Meetup has provided us with many valuable suggestions. For example, since then we started to focus more intensely on how we could help our general audience better understand our project. It was primarily thanks to the workshop sessions where we had to come up with solutions to promote our project and human practice within \[just 1 minute](link to our 1-min intro video or audio). Furthermore, we made many friends, especially with members of Team:TuDelft and Team:SZU-China. We sincerely hope that our collaboration will extend to the next competition season. See you next summer!

Heading east, iAPC

Between July 30th and August 2nd, we attended the 6th iGEM Asia Pacific Conference. iGEMers from China, America, Japan and other countries gathered together to communicate about the progress of their projects. We have faced larger audiences than EuroAsian, and we were better prepared and made sure to create [a deep and thorough description] of our ENABLE project. Participating in iAPC has not only offered us another excellent chance to practice our presentation skills but also gave us additional helpful feedback regarding our experimental design and modeling.

As we traveled to Taiwan, we also took the opportunity to enjoy their nightlife and food, yummy!

Local & global, CCiC

Between August 28th and 31st, we participated in the 5th Conference of China iGEMer Community held in ShanghaiTech University, Shanghai. It was in the local, and some of us were participating in the conference during the day and working in the lab at night. It was a global event, with 60 current iGEM teams and 500 people attending.

During the conference, apart from presenting our ENABLE project and explaining our poster, we also distributed questionnaires regarding the explanation of logic gates to collect opinions from our colleagues to improve the project. Moreover, we also had a valuable opportunity to meet the iGEM competition organizer Meagan face to face and ask her relevant questions regarding recent competition policy changes and the future of iGEM, etc. Overall, this conference has undoubtedly inspired us with new ideas and new methods, and has provided us with terrific feedbacks for improving our project!

Now, we are ready to head West. See you all in Boston, when the winter comes.

2018 team Fudan abstract

Abstract

Contact-dependent signaling is critical for multicellular biological events, yet customizing contact-dependent signal transduction between cells remains challenging. Here we have developed the ENABLE toolbox, a complete set of transmembrane binary logic gates. Each gate consists of 3 layers: Receptor, Amplifier, and Combiner. We first optimized synthetic Notch receptors to enable cells to respond to different signals across the membrane reliably. These signals, individually amplified intracellularly by transcription, are further combined for computing. Our engineered zinc finger-based transcription factors perform binary computation and output designed products. In summary, we have combined spatially different signals in mammalian cells, and revealed new potentials for biological oscillators, tissue engineering, cancer treatments, bio-computing, etc. ENABLE is a toolbox for constructing contact-dependent signaling networks in mammals. The 3-layer design principle underlying ENABLE empowers any future development of transmembrane logic circuits, thus contributes a foundational advance to Synthetic Biology.