Collaboration:
This year, in order to accord to the standard of Gold Medal, we made contacts with other IGEM teams in China to exchange ideas, introduce each others’ projects and give advice to perfect them. Those teams that we cooperated with are from NAU, UESTC andJSNU.
Before our meeting, we arranged a video conference, during which we introduced our projects and ideas briefly and planned the itinerary for meeting up.
On September 28th 2016, some team members of NAU came to our college with their wonderful ideas and great interests to discuss our projects in detail so that we could better understand both of our projects and dig into the part that we may need to cooperate. During the discussion, we talked about our understanding of synthetic biology, including its huge potential in benefiting human beings and all kinds of amazing breakthroughs that scientists made lately. Then we displayed and deeply explained our project, to which they gave some great advice such as taking time into consideration in case of traffic congestion to optimize our path planning, shifting the current quaternary system to ternary or binnary system to improve the efficiency in solving comparatively short distances and so forth, which are all very practical, valuable and meaningful.When furthering our understandings, we came to realize some obstacles getting in their way which we might be able to help. In the end, we made decisions about assisting them with producing a practical model designed by them through our 3D printing technology. The practical model is a physical unit which can degree 3-PBA thoroughly and sterilize agricultural waste water.
(As above pictures presented, the machine was printing the physical unit designed by NAU-China team. We can see what the cover and main unit looks like respectively after 5 hours and 10 hours.)
In our collaboration with UESTC-software team, We helped them to accomplish the part of software testing. They were the developer of the software Bio101. For they need someone who can do an objective testing. We tested the fault tolerance and randomness of Bio101 as their first user and offered them with a software testing report. Meanwhile, we analyzed bzip2 compression algorithm they used in Bio101 through building mathematical modeling. And our members found some problems when using Bio101 in respect of restoring and extracting DNA data. After deep analysis, our team made some suggestions to them. Through our cooperation, both of our teams firmly believe that the problem of storing an astronomical number of our pathway information can be solved. Also, their project Bio101 can be put into practice and be got upgraded.
Besides, we made a quick flashing video JSNU IGEM team, which is also an interesting part of our human practice. Both were wearing T-shirts with “IGEM” printed on it and dancing. In this form of collaboration, we were like a big family working together to let more people know the awesome IGEM.