Collaboration
High Schools
ZJU-China attaches much interest in communication with other teams. It’s very necessary to know more about others and to help each other is the very tradition of Zhejiang University. This year, we helped H4Z to get started in iGEM, helped HZAU with modeling and provided BNU with two important gene circuits.
To help H4Z, we held some seminar in Zhejiang ST, in which we talked a lot about how to run an iGEM team and what should be paid attention to in an iGEM project. Also, we did our experiment in the same lab so we got even more time to help them. In the modeling part, our dry lab helped them write their wiki in a technical way.
The picture of teaching high school teams to do experiment.
BNU
To help BNU, We constructed two main circuits, first one expresses a serine integrase. This intergrase can exclusively catalyze site-specific recombination between attB and attP (click here too see more information from BNU's wiki) , the attachment sites on phage chromosome and host chromosome. This recombination results in the reverse of the sequence between attB and attP, changing the two sites to attL and attR at the meantime. This inversion can be reversible by appropriately controlling the conditional expression of integrase and an excisionase in Bxb1 named gp47 at certain ratio. We change start codon ATG to GTG for a appropriate expression quantity.
The second one contains a switch, two reporters, two RBS and terminators. At first, the plasmid expresses GFP, when gp35 is expressed, the switch will turn around and RFP on the other side of the plasmid is going to be expressed.
The first gene circuits we built for BNU.
The second gene circuits we built for BNU.
Map of those two circuits are shown above. And figures below show us circuit 1 and 2 using Agarose Gel Electroporesis.
We performed experiment to see whether our circuits work. From the figure above, we can find out that when only circuit 2 is transformed (A), GFP is expressed, when both of the two circuits are transformed, the switch turns and RFP is expressed.
HZAU
HZAU-China is going to design a device to control the light intensity of LED beads going as a specific function and can communicate with matlab. In the beginning, their team members were not familiar with SCM ((Single Chip Micyoco) , so they turned to our Dry Lab member for help. we shared them a basic program which can change the brightness of LED through controlling PWM as a reference and other suggestions online. Learn more about our friends here .
Completed the SCM program for HZAU and they affirmed our help
NCTU Meetup
In Formosa, we shared our ideas to each other, here is photo of ZJU-China and NTU.
In Jul 19-24, we attended in the Asian Conference in the National Chiao Tung University, Hsinchu where we made our presentation in that conference to share our idea and project to many Asian teams so that we could get everyone know our idea. In addition, we brought every team gift, the special candy named “Big Termite”, which made everyone feel great about that. We did a lot of work to prepare our presentation and poster to make sure everyone there can understand what we’re doing even get inspired by us.
