iGEM at Tsinghua University
This year, our team launched collaboration with the iGEM team at Tsinghua-A University.
Tsinghua-A’s iGEM project aims at constructing a synthetic biology circuit to seek insights into noise propagation as well as measure the capacity of parallel information channels. To better scrutinize the information flow mechanism, they planned run computational simulations on Matlab combined with the wet lab work. However, when they were simulating their system with Gillespie Algorithm, they fell short of computing power when it came to scanning the parameters. Due to the limited time frame, it was indeed a big challenge for them to deal with the difficulty shortly.
Knowing about their urgent need, immediately, our team decided to assist them by utilizing the equipment resources as well as team members with required intellect. Through a series of online conversations, we soon figured out the background information about their project and planned out a feasible solution to help them out. We actively communicated with several relevant research groups at ShanghaiTech as well as the nearby SARI (Shanghai Advanced Research Institute) to seek qualified computational platform. Then, we modified and operated the algorithm where we mainly scanned several key parameters, Ka (dimer association rate) and Kd (dimer dissociation rate constant). As later commented by the Tsinghua-A iGEM Team, it was our timely help that significantly boosted the efficiency of their project.
Meanwhile, benefiting from this connection, frequent team communications were raised as well. After exchanging the idea with regards of the projects, members from the Tsinghua-A showed strong interests in our Solar Hunter system. To better illustrate our biofilm-based platform strategy, the wiki-design team at Tsinghua-A depicted a brief mechanism of our project in a cartoon style, which provided us some inspirations to design our own big picture later on. The figure they drew is used and also can be seen on our Wiki page.
Click here to see our assistance reported by the iGEM team at Tsinghua University.
iGEM at Jiangsu Normal University
For this year’s competition, our team collaborated with the iGEM Team at Jiangsu Normal University.
JSNU’s project aims at applying anthocyan to a potential cancer therapy. Their early experiments were conducted based on the HEK293T where has a low expression of KLF4 compare with GES1. To better test their idea,various cancer cell lines were required for the further explorations. However, when they turned to work on the cancer cells, they realized that later cell generations (normally after the fifth generation) could be applied better in the test, but not commercialized cancer cell clones. Additionally, due to the high expense of the cell clone as well as the long time period of the cell culture, it seemed impossible for the team to conducted their further experiments in cancer cells within the time frame necessary.
Thankfully, our team just had the hela cell clone (the ninth generation) in stock which was originally prepared for our previous idea for the iGEM competition. Also, benefiting from some of the group members’ professional skills in cell culture, the cell clone demonstrated good viability. In response to the emergency request from the iGEM at JSNU, we very soon prepared the cell samples according to their needs, and sent the materials immediately.
They repeated their experiment among several varieties of cancer cell lines including Hela to see if their project can be realized on these cancer cells. However, The Hela cell seemed to be a little overexpressive of KLF4 that did not fit the situation well. Last but not least, the Hela cell became an indivisible part in their project and gave them new thinking.
Meanwhile, the wiki-design team at JSNU provided us assistance in creating avatars, where they drew a serious of cartoon bacteria characters based on the real photos of our team members. These avatars are plan to be used and will be showed at the Team Session on our wiki page later.
Click here to see our assistance reported by the iGEM team at Jiangsu Normal University.
