Meeting with Team Peking
In the knowledge-storing period, team Peking helped us a lot. Yihao Zhang, team leader of Peking, shared his experiences and skills on team construction. Haoqian Zhang, instructor of Peking, shared his understanding about iGEM and synthetic biology. He also provided us with valuable advices on our project.
It’s inspiring to witness their group meeting, we are grateful for their openness.
Conferences Calling for Advice
At the end of brain-storming period, with 5 alternative projects, we invited professors to give us advices. They mentioned multiple aspects that we’ve never concerned, even shared skills on funds management.
Except professors, we gave presentation to fellow students, listening to their points of view. Unlike professors, students’ suggestions are more imaginative, and their questions are sharper.
Interview with Experts
Ferritin Mineralization
Soon after the setting up of project, we were trapped by technical problems. It was a monograph written by professor Yongxin Pan that attracted our attention: There are many details about ferritin and biomineralization, which helped us a lot. We connected him, and he welcomed us. His friend, assistant professor Changqian Cao, who does research on ferritin and in vitro mineralization, shared valuable tricks and experiences with us. They also recommended professor Jintian Tang, who is an expert at Magnetic hyperthermia.
Ferritin Heating Performance
Fortunately, professor Jintian Tang also welcomed us, and introduced us professor Yun Huang, who had done researches on heating performances of ferritin. Professor Huang shared her data about heating performance of ferritins in plants, gave us suggestions on sample preparation, and offered us parameters of heating device of their own design.
Magnetic Field Generator
Constructing a device to generate strong radio-frequency magnetic (RF-magnetic) field was another challenge for us. We visited professor Haoying Wang, professor Guoren Yang, Xiaoyong Luo, Liang Li and Yipeng Wang, they all helped us in different way with this device. However, our failure in constructing an amplifier abolished this scheme.
Structure Analysis of PT7
During locus-selecting period, we visited professor Weizhi Liu, who is an expert of protein structure. He gave us suggestions on structure analysis of T7 RNA polymerase.
CCiC, Beijing, China
This summer, we have a fantastic meeting with iGEMers from various colleges in The Central China iGEMers’ Consortium(CCiC), Beijing, China. We learned a lot from other teams, and made acquaintances with them.
It was interesting to find that some problems we met also puzzled other teams, and it was inspiring to learn their solutions.
