Team:BNDS China/Attributions
Attributions: Started from the bottom
I. Starting the team:
The 2016 iGEM team BNDS_China was established first by Yunpeng Li and Zhongxiu Hu. Then the two of them send the information of this competition available to students in the International Department of Beijing National Day School. After several meetings, the final twelve members of the team (see the team information page) has confirmed.
The registration fee was first paid by Jiangyun Hu (Zhongxiu Hu’s father) and collected as twelve subunits from all members.
II. Finding the Principle Investigators and advisor:
The information of the iGEM competition was also distributed to all the faculties in Beijing National Day School. The Biology teacher, Xiaoling Yao, who has majored in Molecular biology for more than ten years, was very interested in guiding a high school team of iGEM 2016.
Our secondary Principal Investigator is David Brackett, who teaches Chemistry at Beijing National Day School. He used to be the instructor at Portland Community University with condensed researching experience.
Xiangmei Dou is our team advisor who lent us her own lab. She is the teacher who in charges of researching projects at the national department of the school.
III. Deciding the project:
The team was formed around April. Started from April to June, team BNDS_China holds a meeting session every week. Their Principal Investigator Xiaoling Yao and David Brackett has given all team members about the basic information of molecular biology. After acquiring a reasonable amount of knowledge, the team started their process of choosing the topic. Every member of the team has taken part in the discussions and all decided to choose the bacterial hard water softener as the project of BNDS_China.
IV. Conducting the experiment
Stucking from getting the kit and the gene, the team officially started their experiments in late August, where many other teams have already finished their project or at least half of them. At first, coming to the lab is not arranged in a formal schedule and people come to the lab whenever they wanted. However, the consequence of this policy creates an issue of really low efficiency. Then the team leader assigned tasks for different students for the time left (October 10-22). Zhongxiu Hu, Yuanyi Xu, Longyin Wang, Ziqi Wang, Yunpeng li, Hao Yu, Xin Luo, Tianlin Zhao are put into groups and work for two days each. The whole project was connected by Zhongxiu Hu who sent lab notes to team members.
V. Wiki design
Hongliang Xiong and Yifei Yao contributed to the team by writing the style of the team wiki. They had studied html, css, and java script by themselves in their spire time. The first draft of the wiki was written by Yuanyi Xu, Longyin Wang, Yunpeng Li, Yifei Yao, Hongliang Xiong, Zhongxiu Hu. Hongliang Xiong, Yifei Yao, Zhongxiu Hu, and our Principal Investigator, Xiaoling Yao, edited the final version of the wiki.
VI. Teachers' helps
Xiaoling Yao is the person who always took the same challenges with us. Not only instructing about molecular biology experiments, she acts as our model of a responsible researching conductor. When we have failed and depressed, we saw hopes from her encouragements and kept working on the project.
David Brackett is the person who always has solutions to the problems we met in the competition. He has lots of valuable suggestions that we can apply.
As for our advisor Xiangmei Dou, she guided us in a more general way. She kept reminding us of the importance of maintaining a clean and comfortable lab.
Acknowledgements: people to remember
I. Collaborations
Collaborating with other teams has made the whole iGEM experience more intriguing. Team UCAS and team SDSZ_China have enlightened us experimenting and attending the Giant Jamboree,while team CIEI-BJ gives us an opportunity of having a better experimenting environment.<.p>
II. Contacting with iGEM Head Quarter (iGEM HQ)
Contacting with iGEM HQ has solved our problem of kit distribution and changing members. Every email sent by the iGEM HQ has given us hints to what should we do. Without their helps, we will miss uncountable deadlines and innumerable connections with the iGEM society, which are so important for new teams such as us.
III. Families and friends
Helps from relatives and friends play another important role in our project.
Professor Yeguang Chen and his post-graduated student Xuanhao Xu (Zhongxiu Hu’s tutors during her 2015 Science Talent Project) have given valuable advices due to the experiment results as well as inspiring the team with fantastic ideas for free.
The post-graduated student Tianyue An at the Institute of Botany, the Chinese Academy of Sciences has also given generous helps with improved protocols.
Haohuan Wang (a relative of Yuanyi Xu) who is specialized in computer science had given valuable suggestions and directions of javascripts designs.
IV. Financial support
In order to keep our research project going on, Ms. Natalie Jonk from Walacea (a crowdfunding website) has helped us to achieve the funding goal and given us useful information of how to make people attention to your work. (See more information on the page of Human Pratice)
The application Qing Song Chou (A Chinese crowd funding platform) also helped us to get financial supports not only from parents and friends, but also supports from warm-hearted strangers.
Without any of the people above, we are not able to make our project.
