Team:UST Beijing/Collaborations
Collaborations
We contected with team of Tsinghua university called Tsinghua-A. We come to their laboratory and did experiment with them. Also, we set together to discuss our project and show different ideas of each other. We exchanged advises which will help us doing better in next work.
The friendship between University of Science and Technology Beijing(USTB) and Tsinghua University began from the middle of last century. In 1952, Beijing iron and Steel Industry School (The predecessor of USTB) was found. It was under the support of the teachers and students in Tsinghua University that our academes could be able to set up and perfect gradually developed. Because of the deep friendship between two universities, we contacted the IGEM team of TSINGHUA University, Tsinghua-A. Thanks to the help of the members of Tsinghua-A for helping us solve some problem through our communication and learning with each other.
Project communication
We hoped to visit the laboratory TSINGHUA University, so being the host, they introduced their IGEM project to us firstly. Most members in their team are majored in automation, so we were not familiar with the Professional NOUNs like ‘noise reduction processing’ and information theory. But through a brief description, we could be able to get the point that they were interested in the problem of noise in the process of signal transmission, they hoping to methods of mathematical modeling to display how noise can have impacts on the process of signal transmission.
Considering most members in their team are not majored in biology, we used some simple words to explain our idea rather than biological professional nouns. We mainly introduced characteristics and application of traditional Chinese medicine, notoginseng. The idea that we use notoginseng as culture medium directly for fermenting E.coli caught their attention. Then we focused on explaining the process of our double plasmid system experiments, and talking about that the phenomena were contrary to our expectation. Their assistant were interested in our experiments. He discussed about the feasibility of some experiments.
Discussion on the problem
We brought out that we met with difficulties when synthetizing 4 gene fragments into a plasmid. The Tsinghua students gave us many practical advices. One of them is suggesting us using Gibson assembly kit. With this kit, the DNA fragments could be bound to each other by using master mix (contain 3 kinds of enzymes) in a constant temperature bath for 1 hour. However, Gibson assembly kit could only assemble the fragments less than 80 bp, while the DNA primers we need to assemble were 150bp. Thanks to team members of TSINGHUA-A, we were able to amplify our plasmid by the method of using both PCR and assembly kit.
Meanwhile, we discussed about other problems about wiki and social practice, and we all got a satisfactory result.
Visiting laboratory
There were not many researchers in their Lab when we visited, so they have times to show us around their labs and discuss about conducting experiments.
Summary
Through this communication with fellows in Tsinghua University, we have learned much about automation. It not only expanded our horizons, but also enlightened us that the combination of biology and information theory would have a broad prospect. Besides, fellows in Tsinghua University also impressed by our creative ideas of conducting experiments. In short, it’s been a pleasant and successful communication.
