EDUCATION AND COMMUNICATION

Educational in high school

Since we are a group of high school students, our project attracted a great number of classmates who became interested in iGEM and the aim and significance of our project. We agreed that participating in iGEM was a lot of fun. More importantly, we now have deeper understandings and insights on issues related to food safety. Moreover, the discussion on biological products is prevalent amongst high school students, which is why we have planned lectures on biology and online community activities to be held in the after-school programs of Chengdu Shude Highschool and clubs in Chengdu No.7 High School International.

Fig.1 In-school Lectures

Our lectures are based on 3 main areas. The first area is “biology and life”, which introduces basic knowledge on synthetic biology and its applications in real life regarding food safety issues. The second area is “food and biological products” which introduces Staphylococcus aureus(S. aureus) inhibition principle (the basis of our project) and discusses biological products and transgenic products. The final area focuses on introducing iGEM as an academic competition.

Fig.2 Participants’ feedback1

We hope that our sharing was effective and helpful, so we designed questionnaires for the participants in the lectures to receive feedback. We discovered that high school students are especially interested in one of the key aims in iGEM, which is“Local people solve local problems”.

Fig.3 Participants’ feedback2

When we received such feedback, we began to realize that teenagers are so interested in synthetic biology, and a new idea came into being: building a WeChat official account for science popularization!

Establishing the science popularization official account

When we prepared to build an official account, we found that there were many extreme and even wrong pseudoscientific views on the Internet. However, many elderlies believed deeply in such claims and teenagers were also confused by it. Therefore, we not only use this official account as a platform for sharing knowledge, but also hope to practice the social responsibility emphasized by iGEM by publishing correct popular science information.

We launched, along with Jilin_China United, the special science popularization of "20 whys" on official account to collect questions from non-biological professionals such as high school students, the elderly and office workers about GM, synthetic biology, and Life Sciences, and provide bilingual answers. （Click here to jump to HP page for details)

We also displayed the excellent topics of previous iGEM on official account. We hope that the public will be able to engage in synthetic biology as much as we do.

Fig.4 Popular science column

Community Food Safety Advocacy

As a project focusing on food safety, our inspiration comes from the daily life of community residents. It is within our responsibility and aim of the project to inform the community of food safety matters. We have learned through several ways that some families with senior citizens often find themselves in dispute with one another over the disposal of leftovers. Most elderlies have experienced food and resource shortages in the past, therefore do not wish to waste any leftovers. This results in the situation where leftover vegetables and meat are often refrigerated and eaten many times despite potential hygiene and safety issues which the younger generations are concerned about.

We have set up Food Safety Public Welfare Stations in the community center and came up with topics targeting the elderly, such as: "Eating overnight meals like this is equivalent to taking poison", "Food that has not spoiled may already be unsafe", "Food at home is safe to store this way", "How many pathogenic microorganismal hazards do you have in your kitchen".

These eye-catching topics caught the attention of many elderlies as well as some middle-aged and young citizens.

Fig. 5 Community Advocacy

COMMUNICATION

Conference of China iGEMer Community

From August 19th to August 23rd, we participated in the 9th Conference of China iGEMer Community (referred to as the CCiC). We produced posters, gave presentations, and received suggestions from the judges on experimental procedures and safety. After presenting and viewing other people's presentations, we realized that there is still room for improvement in our speech content and PPT. We can increase the content of relevant stakeholder groups and accounting product costs, and increase the proportion of pictures in our PPT.

After the conference, we conducted academic seminars with Worldshaper-SH, Worldshaper-HZbioX, BIT-China, LZU-HS-CHINA-B, NMU-China. CCiC was a crucial part for us to prepare for the final presentation and response.

Fig.6 CCIC conference project display and participation certificate

Meetup with Worldshaper-SH

From September 10th to September 11th, we participated in a seminar hosted by Worldshaper SH and Worldshaper HZbioX, where we demonstrated our projects and communicated with Dr Jiequn Wu. Dr. Wu gave us constructive feedback on the presentation of the inhibition effect of S. aureus toxin in our project.

Fig.7 Project display during the meetup

Scientists

The two-way communication with experts in relevant fields has provided us with many guiding opinions on project design, so we categorized the communication with experts in various fields as a part of HP. （Click here to jump to HP page for details)

2019&2021iGEMer

Hanwen Wang

Hanwen is a 2019 iGEMer and currently a NYU student. He gave suggestions and corrections to our project background story and application scenario description.

Shunzhi Wen

Shunzhi is currently a student at the Georgia Institute of Technology. As a former iGEMer, he proposed revisions to the grammar and logic in our project description.

Ruoxi Fu

Ruoxi is a 2021 iGEMer who gave us advice on safety and parts.

Meng Hu

Ms. Hu used to be the Secondary PI of the iGEM team. She provided us with advice on grasping the timing of the competition. She suggested that we should complete at least two draft revisions before the submission deadline of the competition. She thoroughly considered the academic workload of the high school students in their school, and suggested that we should complete most of the experiments and HP field work before the start of the semester in September, and use it for document writing and online work after September.

Fig.8 WeChat communication with former iGEMer