Collaboration
Collaboration always plays an important role in iGEM. As a new iGEM team, we focused mainly on our experiment. While the rules of iGEM was so complicated that we felt quite difficult to put our hand on the project. Luckily, when we met obstacles and setbacks and we had been seeking advice from 3 teams.
We invited NUDT-China that has participated in iGEM many times to our school for discussion. We held a meeting to exchange our experiences. During the meeting, NUDT-China introduced the iGEM process, and shared their experience in team building in detail with us. At the same time, they gave comments on our project, and put forward a lot of good ideas. We keep in contact with Fudan-China which has participated in iGEM since 2013. Meanwhile, we visited their lab and studio. From the visit, we learned the importance of clinical regulation. The TMMU-China introduced to us some details about the iGEM and we visited their lab in this summer. The technique problems were solved by their advice and experience.
On the other hand, we joined CCIC for the first time. CCIC(Conference of China iGEMer Community)，as one of the best communication platforms for iGEMers in China, has gone through its fifth birthday. During the meeting, we listened to a few lectures given by masters in synthetic biology. The different views of the masters on synthetic biology inspired us to look into the problem we met in our research in another way.
As a preview, three of our team members gave a presentation of our project in English and answered questions from judges and other iGEMers attending to the meeting. During the process, we found many drawbacks of our program, such as the bio-safety parts and modeling parts. We were suggested to hand over the safety form to the organizing committee of iGEM due to the use of AAV. We were also recommended to build a mathematical modeling, which is closely attached to our research, to guide the production and ensure the effects of the antibodies. These parts were not considered in our project because we were not familiar with the rules and the competition. But, luckily, these problems were pointed out by the judges and iGEMers. In the poster presentation, our team visited many outstanding teams’ posters to learn about their experiment design and other good points in human practice, mathematical modeling and so on.
Near the end of CCIC, we joined in the round table conference with Meagan Lizarazo, Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer of the iGEM Foundation. In the conference, Mrs. Meagan shared us experience on the Giant Jamboree, like how to deliver a good speech, attentions on the trip to America and so on. Through CCIC, we learned more about iGEM not only in the attentions and points, but also attracted by the positive research atmosphere. Everyone in the iGEM team had tried their best to fight for more and more achievements and came up with new and better ways to fix the teams’ trouble.
