Collaborations

OFF-CAMPUS ACTIVITY

Jiangnan University

During this iGEM year, Jiangnan University, for the first time, participates in iGEM competition and established two separate teams each having an independent project. As they are new teams, there was much information and requirements that they had little understanding. On this condition, this year we set up both a cooperation relationship and mentorship.

On April 1^st, our team and the teams in Jiangnan University held a meetup for a more detailed assistance provided by our team leader on how to succeed in meeting cardinal dues in iGEM competition and which aspects should be given high attention. We also imparted several tips on team management. In turn, Jiangnan iGEM team promised whatsoever help they are capable of to us.

During Conference of China iGEMer Community, our team with them also gained a chance to have a deeper glance of our mutual projects. By this chance, both of our projects had undergone the test from questions come up by each other

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University of Hong Kong

During the Asia-Europe Meeting in Shen Zhen, our team had a brief discussion about us projects with Hong Kong University (HKU). Both of us had a great interest in each other’s project and would like to seek further collaboration. On 27th July, we went to Hong Kong to have a thorough and impressive meeting with the iGEM team in HKU. We shared the experience of doing transfection experiment in HEK293T and discussed the possible ways to increase the production of the exosome. In addition, some problems encountered when conducting Interlab experiment were discussed, HKU iGEM team offered us some pressure suggestions.

MEETING AND CONFERENCE

CCiC

In this year's CCiC, we presented our project design and the work we had achieved by then. Also by this opportunity for iGEM community in China to showcase a variety of synthetic biology projects, we found that LZU-CHINA possesses a similar project concept in the sense of exosome.

During that conference, we then had a deep discussion on the mutual projects, which later facilitated our collaboration. In addition, NJU-CHINA showed great interests in our project for they have worked on exosomes for years. After sharing our progress and experimental design, they would like to offer us additional help in refining experiments.

In addition, during the poster session, we visited several team booths and provided advice to their project interpretations in casual conversation.

Eurasian Meetup

On July 25, 7 members of our team went to Shenzhen to attend the iGEM2018 Asia-Europe Meeting held by BGI-CHINA and TU Delft. After three days, we are gratified that our design ideas have been recognized by friends from all over the world. During the presentation and poster session, we received a lot of support from other university’s iGEM teams. There were professors from TU Deft, one of the organizers, who provided valuable experience and ideas for teams participating iGEM. At the same time, we, fortunately, had personal guidance from one of the professors during the break, which benefits to made adjustments to the integrity of the experiment. It is worth mentioning that this participation laid the foundation for our cooperation with the University of Hong Kong. They are also committed to the design of the carrier and we are paying attention to each other. After the meeting, we will continue to discuss technical questions about the experiment and explore the common development of our two projects.

WORK TOGETHER

LZU-CHINA

Our modelling team members built a model for Lanzhou IGEM team. In this system, they applied ODE (ordinary differential equation)-system to predict the production of the exosome and other target proteins.

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BIT

At the beginning of July, we reached team BIT who had collaboration interests with us from iGEM community, China. After rounds of communication online by social media, we collaborated in the following aspects by the end of 2018 iGEM year: 1. Our team shared 1ml of SpheroTech calibration beads to BIT for their Interlab study in flow cytometry part. (The company doesn’t set branch in China. Only several agencies are available. Also, the price for one portion is a bit beyond affordable if only one team bears it.) 2. Two teams exchanged their insight on how to determine an iGEM project and mutual selected projects. 3. Two teams discussed the usage of microfluidics and previous iGEM projects from application perspective. (Discussion on microfluidics gave some inspiration on their device design.)

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NAU

We have a long history of cooperation with NAU-CHINA iGEM team, and we have continued to strengthen the cooperative relationship between the two teams this year in modeling part. In the absence of the modeling background for our members at the prophase, they deepened the modeling concept of our members and provided a completed model of the blood-brain barrier, with our members offering a construction idea. This favor largely sped up our leaning progress on building biological models. So, here we express our great gratitude for their helping us! (Click the icon aside to see the model formula and graphs from NAU-CHINA)

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NJU-CHINA

We really appreciated their generous and giant help which added a lot of characterizations on our biopart testing. They invited our team members to their campus to conduct exosome quantification. They also provided us with expensive extraction kit materials and access to advanced equipment without any scruple to us. With their help, we obtained a lot of crucial data about exosome production Booster device and targeting.

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SIAT-SCIE

We developed a partnership with a high school team, SIAT-SCIE, during the Eurasian Meetup in Shenzhen, China. During the meeting, we introduced our projects to each other, exchanged ideas concerning the projects and shared our experience in participating in iGEM. Additionally, we also forwarded suggestions to improve their project by developing a specific protein-packaging system.

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