Difference between revisions of "Team:AHUT China/Collaborations"

     iGEM competition is coming to an end, and a lot of teams have put out applications for various collaborations on the iGEM website. Fortunately, we got an opportunity to be part of the team Harvard (Fighting Stigma Against Synthetic Biology), and we also wanted to promote communication between us through the cooperation.

    This year, Harvard wants to work with other teams to end the misunderstanding of synthetic biology. We found that human exposure to bacteria tends to have negative effects, which considered as something dangerous. As an iGEM team, we understand that genetically engineered bacteria are largely untapped resources, helping us show the world the true potential of using such a bacteria for treatment, diagnosis, environment and more.Harvard plans to release a series of articles to show all the cool things and germs the team is working on. Besides, they want introductions of other teams’projects, so we send ours to them on request.

    Here is the introduction of our project. In the wake of the increasing greenhouse exerting more serious impacts on the global environment, the question of how to efficiently deal with CO2 is particularly critical. However, the traditional gas collection technology featured by high energy consumption and low efficiency is not yet mature enough. Meanwhile, it is these characteristics that have limited the development of itself.Our project is to obtain carbonic anhydrase (CA-2) with high thermal stability through computer simulation of the protein molecules expressed by carbonic anhydrase gene locus mutation, and import it into escherichia coli cells to achieve efficient collection of CO2.

    We are honored to participate in this cooperation, and hope that through this channel we can reduce the misunderstanding of genetic engineering.

 

 

    We saw the cooperation request issued by Linking University's iGEM team (Linkoping_Sweden). Linkoping_Sweden has a new idea of cooperation.They want other teams to use letters or emails to show interesting things happening inside and outside the team. So we participated in this cooperation. This is an interesting collaboration, as it may be boring during the experiment, but the stories that happen in the experiment make the experiment fun.And by organizing these stories, we learn more about our experiments.

    On August, 2018, our team established a connection with iGEM group of NEU-China-A and thus a couple of video conferences have been made so far. The two teams introduced each other's projects in detail; the project of NEU-China was to design a biological system against IBD and preventing CRC by using engineered probiotics. Since the concentration of NO in the intestines of IBD patients was about 100 times than that of normal people; therefore, NO molecules were chosen as inflammatory signals, and probiotics (Nissle 1917) were selected as chassis organisms. The project consisted of two sets of devices, one of which was an anti-inflammatory equipment, including a sensor for detecting inflammatory signals, an effective enhancers and an effector secreting interleukin 10 (il-10). Another one was an anti-cancer device, able to express a kind of myrosinase from cruciferous vegetables by virtue of engineering probiotics. Meanwhile, it can transfer glucosinolate, a natural ingredient in cruciferous vegetables into sulforaphane. Such a kind of product was a type of organic molecule with cancer-fighting ability and at the same time it could inhibit oxidative stress. Similarly, it could work against intestinal inflammation. In addition, we used cold shock kill switches (cold shock expression Lysis and maz-ef) to prevent our engineer bacteria from escaping into the environment and causing DNA contamination.

    During exchange of project experience with each other, we learned that NEU-China-A had a little bit problem in one of the plasmid insertion experiments, so they asked us for help and wanted us to conduct the construction experiment of secreting the yebf-homoil10 plasmid. We and our counterpart made it clear about what we were going to cooperate followed by three video meetings. NEU-China-A helped us carry out experiments on optimizing the conditions of prokaryotic expression of CSCA protein and purifying expression. In a similar way, we helped NEU-China-A perform fragment-linking experiment. NEU-China-A provided us with original plasmid of PCDF-Duet1 (dry powder tube), they taught us to overlap the secretion label Yebf (from BL21(DE3)DNA, GenBank: EF648003.1) with human-derived interleukin 10 (from BBa_K554004, Spring 2018 Distribution 21K 2018 Kit Plate 1), and required us to add the FLAG label at the N end of homoIL10 for subsequent protein detection. According to the requirements of our friend, we conducted the experiment on construction of secreting the plasmid Yebf-homoIL10. Having sequenced and verified the plasmid construction successfully, we mailed the no-less-than-100ng plasmid dry powder to them.

    NEU-China-A helped us implement experiments on optimizing the conditions of prokaryotic expression of CSCA protein and purifying expression. Our friendship has thus been strengthened and the projects have also been pushed forward as the result of this collaboration, which regarded as a successful cooperation by both of us.

    As the project continues to advance, HP's exchanges and cooperations between teams are more frequent and in-depth. After seeing the cooperation application issued by the iGEM team of the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT-Madras) at the iGEM official website, we contacted IIT-Madras to discuss cooperation actively.

    We are pleased to collaborate with the iGEM team of the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras (IIT-Madras) to make a video on the science of synthetic biology in the mother tongue. The Indian Institute of Technology is also working with other teams in English, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Bengali, Gujarati and Hindi.

    IIT-Madras sends an English script to our team. We need to match the provided slideshow video with the provided text and add the translated text to the subtitles, and finally make it into Chinese video.

    We thought it was a simple matter, but there were some problems at the beginning.The problem is summarized as follows:

    1. The English script does not exactly match the sound in the video, and some paragraphs are missing.
2. English and Chinese belong to different language families. They are slightly different in grammar, and the word order is reversed in translation.

    3. Some video pictures and sounds are out of sync and need to be adjusted.

    4. Our team members are not familiar enough with the Indian accent in English, and some words cannot be completely accurate.

    After consultation and repeated revisions by the iGEM team members of the Anhui University of Technology, four days later, the results were satisfactory and the video was sent to the iGEM team of the Indian Institute of Technology. We have established a good relationship with the iGEM team (IIT-Madras) of the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras.

    With the successful completion of the HP cooperation, the Anhui University of Technology iGEM team (AHUT-CHINA) looks forward to more cooperation opportunities with the Indian Institute of Technology iGEM team (IIT-Madras).