Difference between revisions of "Team:RDFZ-China/Collaborations"

Overview

RDFZ-China is an active, collaborative team within the iGEM community in China. We share our resources and ideas aiming to create positive impacts on other iGEM teams we collaborated with.

Tsinghua

We provided team Tsinghua with IPTG assay with Ptac in Tsinghua’s IPTG induction devices in their NEON system. Tsinghua was generous to provide us some lab space and equipments to work on our projects. We worked close, both physically and intellectually, to create maximum impacts on our team projects.

SJTU-BioX-Shanghai

This year, we provided SJTU-BioX-Shanghai with plasmids expressing acoustic reporter genes arg1 and arg2. They were applied to report the location of cancer foci combining with ultrasound in their project “E.Coli for Colon Health Observation”. We also shared protocols and equipments regarding non-invasive bacteria monitoring in our section of gas vesicles.

Great Bay China

Zeyu Tang from the team, RDFZ-China, kindly provided help on modeling for team GBC. To be specific, Zeyu gave them one document about previous work he has done on the fermentor model, which contains deterministic ODEs for predicting the productivity of engineered bacteria in the fermentor. In addition, Zeyu wrote another document which illustrates the deduction of Hill equation, helping them create their model simulation.

BFSUICC-China

Our team leader in 2017, Bowen Xiao, did a report on strategies preparing the iGEM competition; then the two teams shared resources and had a conversation on the biggest problems encounter during iGEM. Team BFSUICC-China in September met with us to discuss project updates and Jamboree preparation.

For Metabolic Stress

We applied capacity monitor (Ceroni et al.) to quantify the expression burden of all our systems, and to reduce the metabolic stress, we designed another device for fermentation which used a LuxR repressive promoter (Peking iGEM2011) and cold-regulated 5’UTR region (Ionis Paris 2017). This device only involves one transcriptional regulator, which will be less energy consuming.

DIY bio and Biosafey

Back to the growing and glowing synthetic biology community, despite the ones doing it on campus, more and more people are starting it at home, they call themselves Genehacker or DIY biologists. The lack of sufficient training and efficient surveillance will be a time bomb which we do know there will be a monstrous harmful bioproduct will be made someday in the future, and indeed, it will be a significant threat to the current biosafety basis. Recall our memory to iGEM2009, Peking surveyed DIY bio, almost ten years later, we conducted a similar DIY bio-survey again. We tried to order materials for molecular experiments, using the delivery address to our home, the result was quite shocking that we can buy almost everything for the molecular experiment, from the internet. Then, we went through relevant laws and regulations throughout the world, which we found out that there are no laws related to the credit certification and the address certification about the people who book the biology reagent. Most of the laws are about the quality certification and how they would serve the user after they bought this. We interviewed the Director of the center for disease control and prevention. He said that within his experiment with the disease caused by the Bacteria leak, environmental pollution, the vast impact had been caused. Our country has been making all effort which is the highest effort that we have made in the history. He said it is not easy to solve the problem with hard work, it needs the cooperation between all the countries. He made an example of 731 army during the second world war two, the outbreak of pathogens can cause significant social harm. We are still on our way to win the battle, but the effort still needs to be put in.

Community and Future

Also, we hosted two major meeting in Beijing, a Biosafety Forum in October, we invited team leader who runs his high school lab, lab teacher from a university lab, and a former team member from Peking iGEM2009, who participated in that DIY bio investigation ten years ago.

We concluded that the development of DIY bio should be taken seriously, and the permanent way to solve it is through implanting Biosafety awareness into our academic culture. Also, as iGEMer, we should strive to be the considerable and responsible leaders in our community, to ensure the biosafety issue has been taken properly. Another meeting was with biology Olympians all around China, we discussed the future of biology community during the meeting, especially with more and more high school iGEM teams coming up in China, but lack of relevant instruction and education to the students. We came up with the idea of setting up a collaboration between school to share and overcome difficulties hand in hand. This kind of meeting will be continued after iGEM2018, since the community usually grows fast after every iGEM season.

Hopefully, years later, biosafety awareness and considerations can be seriously taken in communities, laboratory studies, and real-world applications.