Team:SDSZ China/Collaborations
Collaboration
Collaboration with CAU_China
While collaborating with CAU_China, our team gained a lot from their experience and ideas. They shared us with the simple synthesis biology textbook they wrote for primary school students, which is an effective way to educate younger students. We both introduced our IGEM project to audiences. And induce them to join the IGEM. In addition, they told us how they attracted the public to engage in their activities as well as what to expect when visiting ab entrepreneur or factory. All above inspired us.
For this collaborating with CAU_China, our experimental group leader Jack Chai gives a fantastic speech of our Mineralization’s experiment process. With the end of the collaborating, he was excited about his lecture, he wrote his thought about this activity. “It was my pleasure to give a speech in the lecture about synthetic biology. I mainly introduce our IGEM program, providing an example of application of synthetic biology for students and helping them get a deeper insight into the synthetic biology in our daily lives. In addition to giving a speech as a lecturer, I was also a learner during the whole lecture. The inspiration given by other lecturers allowed me to understand the synthetic biology even better.” ——A “Serious Man”
After Jack Chai, our IGEM “Chief Leader” Charlyne Dong began to introduce IGEM rules, process, and how to organize a group & create a project even how to research in actual. Well…end of her speech. The leader recall this time, and said “In this presentation, I learned more about synthetic biology by obtaining a lot of interesting and detailed knowledge. As the organizer and speaker of this event, I have a new understanding of the concept of “Education”. When we introduce knowledge or information that is less familiar to the public, we should pay special attention to the audience's acceptance and consider their attitude, instead of just conveying ideas from the ppt that I should talk about. This event also makes me reflect the design of our team "Education", hoping to be able to improve in the next activities to achieve a higher quality.” —— A “Responsible leader”
As a result, we all enjoyed this “Human Practice” collaborating, even though we just have this merely mission, but all of us was whole-heartedness for this. Anyhow, this is a impressiveness action about our team.
Team link can be found here:
Human Practice Collaboration Conference
The human-practice collaboration conference was held on September 21st. We invited five teams to join the conference, including SZ_SHD, NDNF_China, GCGS_China, GreatBay_SZ, and Yucai_SZ. During the conference, we shared the basic structures of our human projects and the things we had done already. We all had conducted interviews with professionals related to each of our projects, and designed some questionnaires aimed at investigating how much the public knew about the backgrounds of our programs.
In the conference, we introduced our stories of conducting human-practice as well as some pieces of lessons we learned during the practice. We understood how to strengthen communication among team members, how to collaborate and co-work, and how to enjoy the process of doing human-practice. We concluded some tips for contacting companies, interviewing foreign professors, and doing investigations. We prepared PowerPoint which introduces our experiment outline while sending email to professors and sent the questionnaire to both Chinese and foreign websites simultaneously, in order to increase the number of clicks, improving the diversity of the participants as well as the accuracy of the results.
We are also inspired by other teams' brilliant human-practice projects. Yucai_SZ, who focused on Restoration of Dunhuang frescoes, organized a large activity served as education, contacting with painting workshop and teaching young kids to draw Dunhuang frescoes. At the same time, they introduced the current situation of Dunhuang frescoes and called for further protection. As a result, their education project could let the children sincerely realize the charm and beauty of Dunhuang frescoes personally, put themselves in our ancestors’ shoes, and naturally generate a sense of protection. GCGS_China, who focused on developing spore seals which are made for anti-counterfeiting of famous painters’ paintings and calligraphy, interviewed a huge number of people from lots of aspects. They asked the counterfeit experts about the current situation of anti-counterfeiting, consulted professional artists and calligraphers about their willingness to use spore seals which help them figure out some potential problems about their seals, and investigated public their values about counterfeiting and the efforts paid on anti-counterfeiting. Meanwhile, they quickly adapted their design when they realized that people were worrying about whether the spore left by seals would further damage the artwork. They all encouraged us to review our experimental methods and human-practice plans, improving them in a more operational and practical way.
Team links can be found here:
Collaboration with NDNF_China
Since both NDNF and our team locate in Beijing, China, we have been working closely from the beginning and have had the chance to offer help for each other. In order to help them with their data acquisition to test the operation of the gene circuit, our IP Dr. Dong, who has previous experiences in using fluorescence microscope, helped them find a lab where they can borrow the instrument. We also dived deep into discussing the protocol of using the fluorescence microscope together, and helped them in collecting important experimental results using the microscope instrument!
Moreover, to carry out the protein expression and verification part of our experiment, Team NDNF_China helped us with the learning, discussing section of the protocol for our SDS-PAGE, which is crucial for verifying our genetically-engineered silicatein sample. Their advisor, who is very experienced in performing the lab, gave us details on debugging and running the experiment itself (i.e: how to properly deal with the protein samples, etc).
Team link can be found here:
