Publicity: iGEM 2011 China Meetup

The China Meetup this year is held in USTC on the July 29th to July 31th. Tsinghua team took an active part in the meeting.

Our team member, Guanqiao Li, attended the meetup as invited speaker and gave a splendid talk on Wisdom in Natural Systems(pic on the left).

Besides, Tsinghua team also gave a report on the progress of our project this year(pic on the right). As the first reporter of all the teams, we were under great stress. However, the result turned out to be good and we got highly recommend at last, which is to our comfort.

Publicity: Lecture on synthetic biology and iGEM

To popularize synthetic biology and iGEM competition, Tsinghua team held a lecture on September 23rd, which was mainly oriented to the lower grade students in School of Life Sciences, as well as all the other students who were interested in synthetic biology.

The preparation of the lecture started 3 weeks prior to the lecture. Posters (See below) were elaborately designed and posted up around the campus. We also bulletined the news through E-mail and SNS, to ensure every potential audience may hear about it.

For the speakers, two members of us were responsible for the introduction to specific programs done by Tsinghua over the years. Besides, to explain what synthetic biology is more professional and comprehensive, we invited Haoqian Zhang from Center for Theoretical Biology, Peking University as our important guest and major speaker. Haoqian Zhang, who is very familiar with synthetic and system biology, has participated iGEM competition for three times, and led Peking team up to Runner-up in Final list last year.

On the evening of Friday, Sept.23rd, we were shocked the moment walking into meeting place, for the room was almost filled up. Never had we thought that the lecture would attract such many audiences. The audiences, most of which were sophomore and freshmen, responded warmly to the splendid lectures given by the three speakers. The talks took ninety minutes in all, while the question and answer session lasted for another half an hour. Finally the whole activity ended successfully, and both the speakers and the audiences were satisfied with it. We were so excited to learn this! Our effort pays!

Cooperation with NYMU

This year, Team:NYMU-Taipei sent us email for help with verification of shuttle vector for AMB-1 magnetic bacteria.

We cultured the AMB-1 bacteria according to the instructions offered by NYMU and measured its OD value accordingly. We prepared electrocompetent cells with TES-sucrose buffer and transformed them with pYMBG vector. We thus verified pYMBG as the functional shuttle vector and characterized their part [http://partsregistry.org/Part:BBa_K624021 BBa_K624021].

Cooperation with XMU

XMU Team met difficulties while building their parts. They could not successfully transform E. coli with parts delivered.

We transformed bacteria with pSB1C3 plasmid and mailed them the bacteria culture.

Cooperation with Tsinghua-A

We met difficulties solving and visualizing our mathematical model. Tsinghua-A helped us solved and visualized the model concerning gradient formation in liquid and part of the model on movement.

Contributions and Attributions

XIAO Shi took charge of finance for the whole competition. ZHAO Yu and LI Li contributed greatly to the chemotaxis part. DENG Pan, ZHU Liyuan, LI Li, ZHANG Yunxiao, CAO Linlin, LI Guanqiao and WANG Shiqi shared the honor of constructing the plasmids for all the latter experiments. CHEN Chen, ZHAO Yu and LI Li finished the protein purification, interaction and detection parts. CAO Linlin helped correct the typo errors in this wiki as you read.

We also need to extend our gratitude towards the assistance from other laboratories. Dr. Mark Goulian from Department of Biology, U Penn, supported us with the E. coli strain and the necessary plasmids for chemotaxis. Dr. Christopher Voigt from Department of Pharmaceutical Chemistry, UCSF also gave us guidance in instructing E. coli chemotaxis.