Team:SHSID/Communication

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Education & Communication

Introduction

Due to COVID19, people have become increasingly reliant on the Internet and digital tools of communication, such as Zoom meetings. However, as the pandemic alleviates in China, people's reliance on electronic devices barely changed, since they are more and more appreciative of the effectiveness and speed of online communications. Following this trend, our team communicate with the world extensively through the Internet in order to reach a broader range of audience around the whole country.

With the realization that not a lot of people know synthetic biology or understand its significance, our team utilize social media to post science popularization articles to educate the public about synthetic biology. In addition, we hold offline college lectures and introduce our project to college professors to gain public and professional recognition of our project.

WeChat Official Account Articles

Wechat is the most popular communication software used in China, so through these articles in our team’s official account, we hope to reach more coverage to expand our influence.

6/28 Introduction of our Team and Project

Fig 1: We can fill the drug shortage using yeast?!

Our first official account article was posted on June 28th (Fig 1). In this article, we introduced our team, which is comprised of 13 students from SHSID, and the inspiration for our team name "Fervēre factory" - "fervēre" comes from the Latin word for yeast. Then, we introduced our research project, constructing an yeast factory that can produce putrescine, and our motivation behind this project, which is to solve the shortage of tropane alkaloids that have many therapeutic functions and can be synthesized from putrescine. At the end of this article, we posted a survey to investigate people's consciousness of tropane alkaloids and related medicine as part of our human practices.

7/1 Science Popularization Article on Synthetic Biology

Fig 2: The jigsaw of life: unveiling synthetic biology

Our second article was posted on July 1st (Fig 2). "What is synthetic biology?" This is the question our team seeks to explain in this article. To make the topic more approachable to the public, we used an artwork as an example to guide the audience into the subject of our article, synthetic biology. Then, we contrasted synthetic biology and biology in the traditional sense to illustrate that synthetic biology is constructing an organism beneficial to ourselves through assembling different parts that researchers already know to serve a certain function. This is our first science popularization article, where we seek to explain what synthetic biology is to the public.

7/6 Cell Factory

Fig 3: 21st century: the Century of Biology

The topic of our third official account article, which was posted on July 6th, is cell factory (Fig 3). Connecting with the previous article, we explained that the cell factory can be constructed through synthetic biology. To illustrate its importance, we highlighted that the factories, despite being compact, produce the desired products with high efficiency, such as antibiotics, making cell factories preferable to traditional factories that take up a huge chunk of space.

Instagram Posts

7/2 Why fervēre factory?

Fig 4: Why fervēre factory?

In this first post, we explained our research topic, team name, and logo. Tropane alkaloids, despite its many uses, are currently in global shortage due to low production rates. Our team hopes to end this shortage through constructing a yeast cell factory that would be able to lower the cost of production. Our team name, "fervēre factory," has "fervēre" derived from the Latin word of yeast and "factory" to signify our goal - building a cell factory. Our logo has a syringe in the middle indicating tropane alkaloid-derived medication, wheat on the sides to symbolize our other genetic modification pathway.

7/4 Nanodrop

Fig 5: What is Nanodrop?

In this post, we briefly introduced the purpose of NanoDrop: "identify and access the purity of samples such as proteins and nucleic acids" and presented a picture of the analysis of DNA purity as an example.

Lectures

7/5 Mini Lecture at Kr Space

Fig 6: Mini lecture at Kr space

On July 5th, five members from our team delivered a speech to white collars at Kr Space (Fig 6). We introduced our research to the audience

9/11 Lecture for Kids at Community Cultural Activity Center, Tianlin, Xuhui District, Shanghai

Fig 7: Lecture for children at at Community Cultural Activity Center, Tianlin, Xuhui District, Shanghai

On September 11th, four members from our team delivered a lecture on Sythetic Biolgy and Genetic Engineering to primary school students. The children demonstrating outstanding knowledge on the subject and actively interacted with us. We further introduced more complex ideas like the CRISPR-Cas 9 technology to the students.

Posters and Artworks

We also designed many posters and artworks for publicity

Fig 7: Box of tropane alkaloids

The artwork above is what we're trying to achieve: creating a cell factory that produces putrescine efficiently, so tropane alkaloids can be produced in large quantities (Fig 7).

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