Team:USTC/general.html

USTC-iGEM-model

General

Overview


     Working in the lab, it is easy to forget the truth that the world on the outside is quite different from the lab and eventually make something impractical. What’s worse, without feedback from the real world, research may get stuck in a terrible deadlock.
     As a team whose intention is to develop a practical method for diagnosing AD in the early stage, we hope our project fit in our life so that more people can be benefitted. To achieve this goal, we need to consider questions beyond the lab: How can we make sure that people know about this method? How can we let people be willing to try our product? How can we gain trust from both doctors and patients? What can we do to let our product survive in the market? Is there anyone who can cooperate with us? Etc. To answer such questions, we need to go out and communicate with people outside.
     As a result, we especially lay stress on the human practice aspect. We contacted the public, doctors, and researchers constantly to receive excellent feedback, and we did learn a lot.

Public Engagement and Education

CCIC

     We attended the 8th CCiC in Shanghai in august virtually because of the pandemic. However, we still learned a lot from the presentations by other groups and teachers. During these days, 79 groups from different places get together (mostly on WeChat and Live sessions) and shared ideas with great passion. We also presented our project to all our friends and received nice feedback.
Public Number

In such a connected world, social media is a powerful tool to convey ideas and get the public involved. And we are lucky enough to live in a time where everybody can achieve this with highly developed platforms.

We chose WeChat, maybe the most widely used social application in China, as a window to show ourselves and spread meaningful and interesting content. We created an official account called “南七 iGEM” which WeChat users can subscribe to and read all our posts.

During these months, we have posted several articles and videos. In our first article, we discussed a social focus that nucleic acid testing might go false positive and gave our explanation at the beginning of the covid pandemic. Until now, this post has received 800+ reads! What’s more, we also introduced some of our research directions. If you are interested, please follow us!
Course: Introduction to Synthetic Biology

To give students in USTC access to systematic training in synthetic biology, Prof. Hong Jiong, our PI, presented a course called Introduction to Synthetic Biology. This course will introduce the basic principles, methods, the advantage of synthetic biology, and the advance of synthetic biology. The students will discuss how we can obtain more information on synthetic biology and integrate them into our studies. Finally, the students will be required to design a project based on their own interested field.
He Fei Science and Technology Museum

     Letting the public have a taste of synthetic biology is very meaningful, especially for the young generation. To achieve this, we contacted He Fei Science and Technology Museum holding the intention to arise the interest in synthetic biology among the public. Fortunately, our idea was warmly welcomed and then we worked together bringing a magic biology adventure to the visitors (most of them are parents and their children) at the Dragon Boat Festival. The theme of this activity is “The Magic World of Synthetic Biology”. And we presented several “Magic Classes” to create an atmosphere in Harry Potter style!



TRANSFORMATION CLASS (DNA extraction in a live experiment)
     We mixed fresh banana with salt and detergent, and then smashed the mixture to get juice rich in DNA. Finally, we added cold alcohol to make the DNA coming out in the shape of the wet fiber.
MAGIC SPELL CLASS (science class about synthetic biology)
     An interactive stage presentation was shown in the museum. Considering the age and comprehension of our little audiences, we used slides with attractive pictures to teach them some basic concepts and a classic example, the development of recombinant human insulin (rh-insulin), so that they could get the point of this field with fun.

     We even designed an animated model of plasmid and used this material object version to better convey the knowledge!
DIVINATION CLASS (exhibition of culture mediums painted with colorful engineering bacteria)

     Engineering bacteria that can produce rhodopsin were used as a purple pigment to paint various pictures and words on culture mediums. During the process of growing, culture mediums will become more and more colorful. We prepared dozens of such “Magic Instruments” and hold a small exhibition. The final result did not let us down. As you can see, it was awesome!
Apart from all these classes, we also have…

Funny Moments

And it was so fun!

recruitment
     Having attended iGEM for over 10 years, we have to face the problem that nobody can stay forever as a team member. As a result, we pay particular attention to letting other students (especially the freshmen) know about us, which is the fundament for them to getting interested and even join us. To achieve this, we made a lot of efforts. Posters were posted everywhere, saying that there is a presentation by iGEM-USTC. And during this meeting, we introduced iGEM itself and illustrated how we develop a project by using our former project as an example. This meeting-up turned out to be a success. We were amazed by their passion and even a group chat was created for later discussion and recruitment.