Team:TJU China/Collaborations

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The WORST gel electrophoresis
As all the teams are working on synthetic biology, gel electrophoresis is necessary for every team member because it is an important way to judge whether the result is good enough. When our team was searching for collaborations, we found the “Worst Gel Electrophresis Scrapbook” hosted by team UNebraska-Lincoln. It is an activity that collects the worst gel electrophoresis images and make them a scrapbook. We also want to compete for the first winner(of course we want the badge). Here are the images we picked:
Figure 1.This is a picture for plasmid extraction on August 18th. I had successfully transformed standardized plasmids into Escherichia coli cells but the culture media was polluted by yeasts. So as you can see, there’s almost no plasmid DNA in this piece of agarose gel. The only two bright strips are not the right size.
Figure 2.Always feel that the system of 50ul cut 1ug plasmids and then recover a lot of gel is very troublesome. One day, I determined to do a big move, so I added 3ug plasmid to a system, I thought enzymes may not be enough, and I believe more enzyme will contribute to more completely cut, so I added the enzyme of 4μl. Expectant preparation, see a blurred strip only to know that the original enzyme overuse will lead to star reaction.
Figure 3.We want to connect two DNA fragments together by overlapping. When we completed all the procedures, had one of our DNA gel electrophoresis run, when we irradiated our nucleic acid gel with ultraviolet rays, we unfortunately found that our The strips are arranged evenly in the arithmetic progression, which really makes me laugh and makes me sad.
Neighbor is the best
Firstly, there are two teams in Tianjin University, TJU_China and Tianjin. For the world wide competition, it is incredible that two teams are in the same university. So, how can we miss the opportunity of collaborating with each other?!
There are too many biobricks this year, and the plasmid pSB1C3 used as vector always run out since only one man in our group is in charge of this. It was very kind of Members from Tianjin that they helped us provide the backbone, which ensured that we can complete so many biobricks we have.
Also, for response, we helped them compare the degradation of the origin with improved NanoLuc in 3 hours, and prove the newly constructed NanoLucPEST could work effectively in Saccharomyces cerevisiaeBY4741.
Secondly, though not in the same university, the IGEM team of Nankai’s school of life science is the closest team with us, only around 20 minutes’ walk. Therefore, there is no reason we don’t show up in the collaboration hosted by them. There are nine teams together who communicated with each other on projects and individual advices or suggestions.
Figure 4.Nine teams together in front of Nankai's school of life science.
3.“Follow me to IGEM”
To tell the truth, we are a little surprised that the number of girls are about two times than that of boys in our University where the population of boys are three times than that of girls. We know that girls like beautiful pictures, and that is why we took part in this collaboration. The Bulgaria team has a tradition to take photos of every place they visit—together or part of them. That’s why they spread their idea for this collaboration. We took photos at some special places in our school and describe of the places.
Figure 5.Our school is the first college in China, which was established in 1895. Every year the school of life science takes part in the IGEM competition, and this year, we decided to do the “magic scissors”(the CRISPR-Cas system). This is a photo of the team members and our school’s monument, which is memorable to all of us.
Figure 6.After more than half year’s hard work, we picked an afternoon to take beautiful pictures around our university and this is one of the creation of us. We not only relaxed but also enjoy the work we have done. Though the idea was thought by the girls(they always like beautiful things), we are still glad to make it interesting.
Failure is the mother of success
4.We believe that every one has made mistakes in labs, some mistakes are very interesting when thinking back. With a curious heart, we participate the collaboration ”Funniest Failure Experience”. Fudan-CHINA is collecting interesting and impressive reasons for failed experiments. A brochure will be designed, printed and handed our at Giant Jamboree to share these interesting experiences. Here are some experience from our team members: Xiaoyu Yang: The first time I pure protein. After centrifugation at 18000rpm, the suspension with protein was directly poured away as a bacterial solution by us. This behavior directly led to our three-day useless working. After awakening, we went to the 4℃ cold storage to “cold” down. Muchan Gao: When I added the last buffer WB of the plasmid, when we were happy, we dumped the centrifuged liquid. Wenzhong Teng: Do you know how to dye protein gel? Yes, boil it with coomassie blue R250 for about 5 minutes. But do you know how to make a gel hard enough to knock out sound on plastic? Just boiled it until water evaporated and you will get one!
With these impressive experiences, we hope every one of us can be more careful about labs and find more interests in IGEM competition and synthetic biology.