Difference between revisions of "Team:Nankai/Practices"

Human Practice: An Amazing Summer！！

As Peter Carr puts it, "Human Practices is the study of how your work affects the world, and how the world affects your work." This summer, Nankai iGEM team worked our best to put the spirits of collaboration and sharing into practice. Not only have we attended many important activities and conferences, but also a new information-sharing platform— iShare has become reality. Let’s see what our team did in this amazing summer!!

1. What is iShare?

During the summer, we ran into many problems when we were working on our experiments. The lack of materials for instance, is one major difficulty that occurred to us. To continue our project, we had to acquire those materials from other laboratories, which involved us into intellectual property issues..

Thanks to the current system of material transformation, we managed to put all the things we needed together. Most of the laboratories would share their resources with us if we sign the material transfer agreement with them. However a small community as Nankai University is, it still took us a long time to find the right materials we needed. We could imagine how difficult if an iGEM team seeks for information about certain materials among the hundreds of previous teams.

As far as we have concerned, iGEM has already established a functional platform for all the participators to share Bio-bricks that have been submitted since the birth of the event, which is absolutely an excellent work for resources sharing. But there is no information about other materials related to the Bio-bricks, such as bacteria strains, antibodies, enzymes and so on. So our suggestion is that iGEM design a special webpage or a section on wiki for iGEM teams to list the materials they use in their experiments. In addition, iGEM teams could label the materials which they are willing to share. And teams who are interested in those materials could contact the owner for more information or a way to acquire the materials. In this way, future teams could have more resources for similar work and may come up with more improvements, while all iGEM need to do is to provide an information platform like “iShare”.

A mature system of all-round resources sharing could definitely make iGEM a better community. Before it could be accomplished, let’s make the first step by setting up an information sharing platform to promote material sharing. Team Nankai has already designed a model for i-Share. See more information on our wiki, and join us to make iShare better and better!

2. iShare Survey

This Summer we have sent iShare Survey to more than 280 iGEM teams. Thanks to every team participating in the survey, we got precious data and many constructive advice on iShare. Here is the result!!.

If you want to participate in the survey, Click here.

5. How do we use γ-PGA?

We prepared SOD loaded γ-PGA hydrogel for wound healing. SOD was loaded into hydrogels to scavenge the superoxide anion and γ-PGA was modified with taurine to load more SOD. γ-PGA hydrogel had high water absorption properties delivering the important moist environment. SOD released from the hydrogel maintained high enzyme activity and SOD-γ-PGA hydrogel could scavenge the superoxide anion effectively. In vivo results showed that SOD-γ-PGA hydrogel could promote collagen deposition, epithelialization, and accelerate the healing of moderately exuding wounds. Therefore, SOD-γ-PGA hydrogel would be a good candidate for wound healing applications. Learn more on Pudding Health Kit.