Education

Overview

Education along with science communication is important for us. There are many reasons for that—unprofessional formal school education, emerging fake news, and increasing conflicts and misunderstanding between science and the public call for actions from us. Therefore, we devoted ourselves to narrowing the gap between science and the public and encouraging communications about synthetic biology. This year, we conducted popular science education both on and off campus, with content for all levels of knowledge in biology.

• On campus, we established a journal club, where different members of the team introduced cutting-edge knowledge about synthetic biology every two weeks. We also cohosted a Biology Seminar Series, inviting Prof. Dong Hyun Jo, from Seoul National University College of Medicine to give a talk on therapeutic revolution for the DKU community. For the general audience on campus, we participated in the Club Expo, and designed activities to promote the scientific mindset.

• Off campus, we contacted a local international high school and successfully delivered science lectures to more than 330 middle and high school students and teachers about our project and synthetic biology.

On-campus education

Journal Club

To enhance education efforts and promote synthetic biology knowledge among those with relatively better biology backgrounds, we organized the journal club activity in the Duke Kunshan community. The journal club has continuously gained popularity throughout the sessions and received good feedback from participants. It also helped to promote the atmosphere of teamwork and discussion among biology students at DKU and laid the foundation for the discussion of practical knowledge as a part of the DKU community culture.

The first journal club event was held on April 30th, 2022. At the very beginning of the meeting, Yuyang, the leader of last year's iGEM team, gave a speech for us and introduced in detail what systems biology is and the basic methods of studying systems biology. This journal club event mainly focused on COVID-19 and then developed into three sub-topics including the antigen test for SARS-CoV-2 introduced by Kathy, human ACE2 receptor & TM air freshening spray presented by Irene, and COVID-19 Vaccines explained by Bruce. Apart from the iGEM team, around 10 freshman students with various backgrounds participated in the sharing and raised many inspiring questions.

The following journal club series continued from July to October 2022. Details of the presenters and their topics are listed in the table below.

Wang-Cai Biology Seminar Series

We occasionally invite experts to discuss various topics in pharmaceutical science and synthetic biology to bring new inspirations. This talk is targeted at those with a relatively professional biology background.

In this Wang-Cai biology seminar series, the DKU iGEM team was honored to co-host the speech delivered by Prof. Dong Hyun Jo from Seoul National University College of Medicine. The talk was titled "Therapeutic Revolution: Application of Novel Technologies", where Dr. Jo introduced the brief history and therapeutic development for one specific type of cancer, retinoblastoma.

Dr. Jo is an assistant professor at Seoul National University College of Medicine in the Republic of Korea. He had his medical degree at Seoul National University in 2007. In 2012, Dr. Jo received a residency at the Department of Ophthalmology, Seoul National University Hospital, and in 2016, he received his Ph.D. at Seoul National University. Dr. Jo's research interest focuses on 3 aspects. The first is the development of novel therapeutic approaches against retinal diseases. The second is the molecular mechanisms of physiological and pathological angiogenesis in the retina and associated organs, the third is translational research on retinoblastoma.

At the end of the talk, Dr. Jo shared his career pathway as both a physician and a researcher. The devotion he made to the clinical therapy of retinoblastoma and the improvement of the health of his patients made him feel that biomedical sciences are not limited to theoretical knowledge, but rather quite practical and can benefit the whole population. The experience and thoughts expressed by Dr. Jo greatly inspired us, which allow us to have more understanding of graduate choices and future career plans.

Club Expo

This event presented the DKU iGEM club to the DKU community, regardless of their biology background. Thus, we designed activities that are easily engaging, but professional enough to provide practical knowledge for undergrads.

We participated in the 2022 DKU club expo both online and on-site. In the online expo, we introduced iGEM club to international students. Our club aims to share frontier knowledge and technologies of synthetic biology. Club activities are conducted through student presentations and speeches given by guest speakers. The iGEM teamwork is divided into 4 parts, biological experiments, modeling, wiki design and human practice. Students showed great interest in joining the club, and many showed interest to participate in future iGEM competitions.

For the on-site club expo, we also made a small presentation to spread common knowledge about probiotics and provided our advice for consuming commercial probiotic products. Our central idea is that the aim of commercial probiotic products should be limited to minor gut discomforts or to improve general health, and long-term consumption is not suggested by the doctors we consulted. Also, we introduced some potential harms of consuming probiotics, trying to give the audience a full image of the commonly advertised probiotic products. We also brought some lab consumables, such as microcentrifuge tubes and agar plates, to introduce some basic lab skills. Students who attended the club expo can have a chance to learn basic experimental skills, for example, how to streak in an agar plate and how to use micropipette and centrifuge machines. Besides providing basic knowledge and doing the on-site presentation, we prepared some interesting questions related to Biology and gut microbiomes for college students from all majors to answer in order to enlarge the students' knowledge about gut microbiomes and biology. The questions include "how have H. pylori been proven to be capable of causing ulcers," "pick out the probiotics from several names of microorganisms," "estimate the number of microorganisms in their stomach", etc.

Off-campus education

This year, expanding iGEM participants and audience was included in the goals of our human practice. Although iGEM competition has a solid audience base in universities, students in high schools have little knowledge of iGEM competition or give up because of their limitation of conducting wet labs. After having an overview of high schools in Kunshan, we decided to contact Dipont Huayao Collegiate School Kunshan to give a speech.

In the first part of our presentation, we introduced the biology team, the modeling team, the wiki team and the human practice team, including their work and collaborations between different subgroups. This part gave high school students an overview of what is iGEM and what they can do.

In China, people often summarize almost every disease of the digestive tract with stomachache or discomfort in the stomach. This could lead to medical issues. For example, people may choose to take OTC stomach medicines instead of going to a doctor. Symptoms may get remission. However, this can lay an underlying problem in the future, such as changing the gut microbiota.

To help the public have a better understanding of digesting, we popularized GI Microbiome and GI tract. The functions of each human organ and different intestinal floras were explained in detail. Along with knowledge, we provided two fun facts --"Mom passes gut microbiota to baby" and "Having stomachache and diarrhea before exams". We also mentioned the harm that using antibiotics can do to the gastrointestinal tract. Along with distributing brochures, our audience understood the basic knowledge of GI parts. Here is our brochure. https://static.igem.wiki/teams/4161/wiki/aqua-and-purple-medical-trifold-brochure.pdf

In China, there is an increasing trend of taking probiotic products. Along with the trend, multiple probiotic products flooded into the health product market. With fancy advertisements and product patents or logos of importing, it is hard for consumers to choose the right products. So, we decided to give the popularization of science which is corresponded to this problem.

In this part, we introduced three kinds of probiotics that products mainly contain: Bifidobacterium, Lactobacillus, and Enterococcus. We mentioned their functions and some potential negative effects that these probiotic strains may lead to. We provided our advice for consuming probiotics and how to choose relevant products at last.

To conclude, we aim to teach people about the GI tract and probiotics in a more interesting and effective way. We first contact Dipont Huayao Collegiate School Kunshan to confirm our target audience, high school students and teachers. So, we decided on the educational level of our presentation to make sure students and teachers can have a better understanding of basic knowledge. For key concepts and academic terms, we annotated them in Chinese as well. To promote our audience to be more engaged in our presentation, we shared fun facts about the GI tract and decorated our slides with fancy pictures. We also dove deeper into the concept of a healthy gut and understand how they will articulate the problem of the GI tract through our Q&A session. Through this presentation, more than 330 middle and high school students and teachers had a basic knowledge of GI and probiotics and knew iGEM competitions further. We will build further collaborations with Dipont Huayao Collegiate School Kunshan. We are looking forward to helping them build their iGEM team and having more communications about synthetic biology.

Summary

To educate the community about synthetic biology, we approached vast categories of audiences including high school students, undergrads, staff and faculty. We have applied diverse educational methods to appeal to our audiences with age and geographical diversity. Apart from arming the audience with scientific knowledge, we were also able to construct the synthetic biology culture within DKU by promoting open discussion and practical knowledge.