On October 9th of this year，We carried out a small class to support teaching to children in remote mountainous areas at Guangxi Laibin City Wuxuan County Experimental Junior High School , explaining to them the basic content and knowledge about synthetic biology, giving them an initial enlightenment about biology, which has a significant and far-reaching impact.
We took this opportunity to go into the mountain village and learn about the lack and scarcity of
educational resources for the children in 
the mountainous area, and we
also learned that the environment and
conditions are very backward due to
the geographical location and transportation.
After understanding the situation, we wanted to help them learn more with our own power. So we started
our teaching activities here. In the process, we educated the children about synthetic biology and briefly
about our project. We not only talked about the origin of life, the cell, but also taught them about the
life of a cell and that people are made of cells, and the children were very interested. At the same time,
we showed them the
hand-drawn book that we designed and drew ourselves
and introduced them to
our topic of microalgae through the hand-drawn book.
The children were very curious about the biological knowledge and asked us questions, and we answered
them patiently.
After the popularization of science, we took a group photo with the children to record their thirsty faces for biological knowledge. At the same time, we also asked them what they wanted to know so that we could do the science fair next time. We to protect the water resources, advocate garbage classification as a starting point, hope can for high school students to preach about sewage treatment technology, the prevention of water pollution, garbage classification and so on, so as to make students form and strengthen the consciousness of environmental protection and garbage classification and form a relatively complete system of environmental protection and the related method, the important thought of the promotion of green environmental protection, Make garbage sorting and water resources protection a good trend and conscious action for more people.
Ensuring the cleanliness of water sources is a vision shared by all mankind. Water sources are influencing the development of countries around the world in various ways, and even influencing the global political and economic direction. With a clean and pure water source, people can ensure their normal daily needs as well as their regular production and construction needs. However, global water resources are constantly being polluted. How to quickly restore the damaged freshwater environment is the main problem of our project. In the world of iGEM, there are also many teams who share the same expectations as we do. The Freshwater Bioremediation Alliance, initiated by XJTLU-CHINA and TEAM Nanjing_NFLS, is a perfect match for our idea. Therefore, we launched a registration to join the alliance and work together with the teams.
XJTLU-CHINA is a team composed of students from the Western University of Liverpool. This year, their main research direction is to use biofilm to adsorb and recover heavy metal ions from wastewater in the industrial wastewater treatment process. They designed water purification cartridges and modified the engineered bacteria with the help of synthetic biology to give full play to their advantages of adsorbing heavy metal ions, aiming to achieve zero industrial discharge.
TEAM Nanjing_NFLS is a team of high school students. They are working on a synthetic biology technique to tackle algal toxin pollution. Such an idea was inspired by witnessing the changes in the Qinhuai River next to the school, which was polluted by excessive cyanobacteria.
The initiators of the Freshwater Bioremediation Alliance wrote the tweets from which we learned about their vision. Based on the nature of the coalition to protect the environment and increase collaborative exploration, they hope that members will set up more scientific activities for freshwater restoration-related issues, reach more groups, and have a greater social impact. At the same time, the Alliance also intends to conduct more discussions from more angles, including project experiments, social practices, and exchanges between leaders, in accordance with the requirements of the iGEM competition, and continue to make efforts to protect freshwater resources. After carefully reading the articles written by the initiators, our members felt that this was very much in line with the original intention of our project. Therefore, we very happily sent emails and told each other about our team's project content and intention to cooperate. In this way, joining the consortium was indeed a happy event for all of us.
Freshwater has become one of the most important natural resources within the global perspective nowadays. From iGEMer's point of view, the Environment Track, which is involved in this, has been a popular track in the race. Based on this background, the collaborators also hope to make more new attempts in the process of cooperation. Through this contact with the the Freshwater Bioremediation Alliance, we can only hope to achieve these deeper goals along with the partnership. Taken together, this should be a common vision for all teams using synthetic biology.
Joining the Freshwater Bioremediation Alliance has enabled us to collaborate with other iGEM teams, allowing us to work together on various research activities related to the project and to have a broader perspective on the issue of wastewater management. It is also a great expectation for the CHINA-FAFU team to collaborate with other teams. We are looking forward to discussing with all the leaders in the alliance, learning and cooperating with each other, and promoting the win-win situation of the group.
After joining the Freshwater Bioremediation Alliance, it didn't take long for us to participate in the first meeting here as an Alliance member. In this meeting, we met many iGEM teams who are also focused on cleaning wastewater and environmental remediation. During the meeting, we had a lively online exchange and made presentations on the projects we were responsible for.
Once we got into the meeting, we got to know the rest of the friends in the alliance. Besides the initiator Nanjing_NFLS and XJTLU-CHINA, the online meeting was also attended by GXU-China and UM_Macau. The meeting was held on July 27th at 8pm and lasted for a total of one and a half hours.
In this session, we presented the main elements of the project and the development process, and explained the details of our project in detail in the form of an online slide presentation. At the same time, we also learned about the Alliance's collaboration ideas and other teams' project ideas. For example, the UM_Macau team from the University of Macau introduced their commitment to use synthetic biology knowledge to solve the problem of seawater acidification as a way to protect the environment, which received a lot of attention. After all parties presented their projects, a series of heated discussions on the plummeting global freshwater resources and the destruction of ecological benefits by human actions began to unfold, with the unanimous hope that future teams researching this area can dig deeper to grasp more relevant information. During the meeting, the head of Nanjing_NFLS team suggested that in order to expand the positive impact of the alliance on the public, the concepts of synthetic biology and biosafety could be popularized to the public through online workshops and WeChat and other online platforms. On the other hand, the director hopes that the members can cooperate with each other to help distribute and promote the questionnaires released by the consortium members. This approach will increase the visibility of the alliance and the team, and likewise bring the distance with the public, so that people can browse the relevant science. Similarly, the team members had a lively discussion about the world's freshwater environment and biological survival, and proposed more ideas on the application of synthetic biology to freshwater restoration and ecological protection, and reached a consensus that in the future, the Alliance will continue to devote itself to the environmental protection industry to achieve more ecological restoration goals.
This year, we have written a safety manual together with CFCA-China 2022, GXU-China 2022, Nanjing_NFLS 2022, Nanjing-China 2022, NPU-CHINA 2022, XJTLU-China 2022 to prove our lab safety and project safety issues.
In the safety manual, we have jointly stated and demonstrated that our experimental measures comply with safety rules and that our gene-editing engineered bacteria do not cause leakage, while at the same time determining that our project will not cause harm to the environment or human health. During the editing process, we have taken into account the dangers and difficulties that may occur during the experimental process. During this process, the Freshwater Restoration Consortium came together to discuss the evolving nature and feasibility of each project and to understand the opportunities and challenges of each other's projects. In this biosafety meeting, we exchanged the requirements related to the official website of the treatment measures taken according to the situation. Its main measures are the design of suicide switches and the use of sealing devices, which is the main way we can deal with leaks engineering bacteria in our function. In addition to this, we also clarified the standardization of laboratory practices and the handling of potentially harmful substances. Our solutions were also improved and optimized for exchange. During this meeting, we gained a deeper understanding of biosafety, so we also took notes. The proposal of each varsity team was to have to be noted in the hope of providing some help reference for the subsequent competition, i.e. another reason why we held the biosafety conference was to leave some reference material for the upcoming work competition.
We all imagined a better biosafety future after finishing this safety manual, and we hope that this safety manual can not only discipline ourselves, but also give safety inspiration to more lab personnel, so that we can shape a better future together.