As a beginner in academia

iGEM

I have once worked in the iGEM team SYSU-China, where I work as a trainee of the interlab study in iGEM 2014 and a team leader in iGEM 2015. I am also a judge for CCiC (Conference of China iGEMer Community) in 2017. The experience playing with iGEM is a real treature for me: I learned how to collaberate with others and how to quickly browse articles in a broad range of topics.

Be a member of the Zhang lab

I was so fortunate to meet Prof. Rui Zhang in 2015, when he was just back to China and planning to set up his own laboratory. We discuessed about the research interests (RNA editing, single cell, etc.) in the empty laboratory (now our Room 416). And I decided to have my Ph. D. at the Zhang lab. Look back, it is absolutely a right decision that my achievements today are built on the autonomy and ability of execution I have at the Zhang lab.

I never feel shame to tell others that I have a lot of failed projects, much more than my publications.

My first project is to set up a algorithm for RNA editing level prediction based on the miRNA editing data, where we believed that the uniform pairing feature of miRNA can make us easier to learn the meachanism of RNA editing behind it. I started to learn programing (sadly, courses in SYSU is out-of-date and we have not been taught before). I gradually grasp R, Python and Linux, after some disatsters beginers will meet (rm -f, unlimited disk writing, etc. ). Of course, we did not finish that project, and nobody achieve it upon now.

No long after that, I initiated my undergraduate thesis project: set up Drop-seq by myself. That’s in 2015-2016, we don’t have any agent for the materials in China. We bought the pumps, the magnetic mixer, the beads, the oil, and any other requirements. I transported the chip from Macow. I isolate the cells and set up everything by myself. Our purpose is to capture miRNA in a single, but the first thing is to repeat Macosko’s experiment. I also have to set up the compuational pipeline in our server. I finished my thesis, but we finally give up the project for the cost and incompatibility of the reagents. Of course, nobody achieve it upon now.

The third project before I became a Ph.D. student is to build the home page and the database (miREDB, miRNA editing data base) for our publication (Genome Res., 2018). As a beginner, I had no idea about HTML, SQL, and espcially the backend. That is the Spring Festival in 2016. I locked myself in my room for two weeks. I tried to learn the full-stack processes of building a website from the backend to the front by reading the tutorials online. And, I survived. I got out of my room with the prototype of them. Latter, they are deployed in our server. (Sadly, these two websites were shut down due to our School’s “Website Security Policy”)

Then I move to my Ph.D. career.

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