Although more than 2 years passed after COVID-19’s first outbreak, the conspiracy theories that prevailed at the time still leave a dangerous impression of biology on most people. To reverse that impression and show the beauty of synthetic biology to those students that are not familiar with it, we participated in the school’s art club fair and designed several agar artworks to demonstrate basic notions of biology as well as show attractive figures. The strains we used are E.coli BL21(ED3) and transform plasmid that constructively expresses chromoprotein. Out of safety concern, all the plates were sealed twice and completely disinfect with alcohol before sending them to the exhibition, a transparent plastic plate is covered on the exhibits to avoid release, and all visitors are separated from the exhibits by fence to maintain a safe distance more than 2 meters
Figure 1. Picture of some exhibits
Figure 2. Picture of exhibits' decoration
A lot of students in grades 7 to grade 10 are eager to participate in various scientific innovation competitions to demonstrate their abilities in biology experiments. However, few of them have an idea about how to choose a topic for their project and what difficulties they might face during the process. Using our project as an example, we offered a lecture to these students, introducing how to build a project using a central pathway-optimization method (which is finding a useful but imperfect biosynthetic pathway and using multiple methods such as directed evolution, protein quality control, and advanced induction systems to improve it) and how to honestly and peacefully face the sometimes unpredictable result in experiments. After the lecture, we answered a lot of questions about our project and experimental design. All our audiences think our lecture is helpful.
Figure 3. Pictures of the lecture
Many grade 10 students in the international department of our school want to learn Biology experiment operation in advance. Thus our team held a Biology culturing camp that allows 5 to 6 students to learn basic operations in Bacterial experiments (including sterilization, chemical transformation, liquid inoculation cell spreading…) after school. The camp had now taught over 20 students and will be a long-term project. Feedback from students that participated in the bacteria culturing camp shows that it helped them a lot in terms of preparing for their own high school research project or for next year’s iGEM.
Figure 4. Left: students watching demonstrations of cell spreading. Right: a student pipetting
Students in grade 10 and grade 11 that already have abundant biology knowledge are willing to participate in Biology Olympics to challenge themselves and prove their ability. To help them to be more prepared, we collaborate with our school’s biology Olympic club Biocamp to offer five 2 hour courses about DNA, gene expression, expression regulation, virus, and biotechnology in March and April. The courses have solved many difficult problems for students, and they told us that the courses are very helpful. Thus we plan to continue the course next year and broaden its topics to other aspects of Biology.
Figure 5. Advanced course in biology
