Team:SYSU-Software/Education

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As iGEMers who have been exploring the fun of Synthetic Biology and Bioinformatics, we naturally want to engage more people into this field of possibility and challenge and motivate them with our passion. One of the problems that we noticed when it comes to Synthetic Biology is that, although it is a frontier where many great minds working on different fields are needed to create wonder, it is mainly known to people majoring in biology only. Therefore, as a team mainly uses software to tackle problems, we decided that we wanted to do something to introduce students of as much fields as possible to the world of Synthetic Biology and Bioinformatics and ignite their interest by showing how many possibilities there are for people in different fields to realize their potentials.

We decided to wait until our project is nearly finished to start this program so that it could work as a wonderful example of what Synthetic Biology and Bioinformatics are, and an illustration of what we have been working on with great passion. It was estimated to be late September when the freshman roll in. Therefore, we targeted our audience as freshman, interested sophomore and third-year college students majoring in varied subjects, including biology, computer science, mathematics and so forth.

Initially, we planned to hold an activity where some we can intrigue our participants with some quizzes and games related to our project. However, due to the still on-going pandemic, we had to control the population involved. We insisted holding the program offline because it allows better communication, so in the end we chose to do a lecture on the topic of Future Synthesized, where we introduce the field of both Synthetic Biology and Bioinformatics, and our own project, Phoebus.

Considering the background of our audience is varied, we chose to start the lecture with two products that are able to significantly improve our daily life, which can be made possible by Synthetic Biology and Bioinformatics: home-produced medicine that help people recovery quickly and safely; organism intaking specific poisonous matter made by factories within minutes. We were very happy to see that our audience were immediately engaged with the content and were ready to explore with us further into the fields of Synthetic Biology and Bioinformatics.

So, we introduced to them some basic concepts and some applications of Synthetic Biology and Bioinformatics with the answers to the following questions: Is Synthetic Biology the same as genetic engineering? What are the fundamental principles of it? How do we build a life with Synthetic Biology and Bioinformatics, and how do we combine them?

The answer to the last question naturally led us to an introduction to a prestigious competition in Synthetic Biology, that is iGEM. And we exemplified the goal of the competition and how Synthetic Biology and Bioinformatics combines with our project this year, Phoebus. We decided not to use terms but used simple language to share our inspirations, what problems we tried to tackle, how the software works and the passion we have for Phoebus.

During the lecture, we were really motivated to see audience showing great interest in how our project tries to solve actual problems by combining Synthetic Biology and Bioinformatics. And in the free discussion stage, some audience shared their view of considering iGEM a great way to gain insight into the combination and a good chance to actually practice the idea. In all, we think of this lecture really successful, because of these signs that showed some of the audience outside the field of biology were really began to be interested in Synthetic Biology and Bioinformatics.