Our team collaborated with two teams, Feed Family (Shanghai_United) and TeMoZerapy (SubCat_Shanghai), respectively. Due to the long distance, we collaborated with each other through virtual meetings and shared our experiences in the promotion video as well as on other topics.

In the virtual meeting with the Feed Family team (Shanghai_United), we made a brief introduction to our team, including our team members, our project, and so on. We also underlined the application and the importance of 1-Butanol. Then the team Feed Family also introduced their project aiming to the decomposition of the cellulose in feed which would promote digestion and absorption of the nutrition for cattle and sheep.

Since we both created our team WeChat Official Accounts, we suggested that we should post not only the daily activities of the team but also the popularization of science to raise concern regarding our focus issue of the public. If possible, we could clip and post some educational videos even vlogs to cover those popular video channels that would be better for educational purposes. In addition, we also shared our plans for conducting an offline lecture for young children which would be also set up live on Instagram.
We mentioned that the major promotional social media we used is Moments on WeChat.to share our posts. However, since we only have limited WeChat friends, we were quite worried if we could not attract more followers. In this case, they advised that we could focus more on the contents of our posts, focus more on the core topic, butanol and use analysis graphs to illustrate the importance of butanol, which is of great help for us.

According to the epidemic prevention and control policy in Shanghai, people would better stay at home unless it is necessary, which caused a big challenge for the Feed Family team. As a result, they chose to sell their peripheral products online through WeChat Store which inspired us. Even though we luckily had the opportunity to sell our peripheral goods offline, we decided to adopt both methods.
Since we started our project earlier than Feed Family, we also shared some useful tips with them, especially about how to design a peripheral product poster and what factors shall be considered during the product pricing. Regarding the pricing, we suggested a “0.9 trick”, like ￥9.9 or ￥19.9, etc. It could usually catch the potential customers’ sight who may stay for shopping due to the “lower” price.

The Feed Family team has more members so they had the advantage on task allocation, they started shooting the promotion video earlier than we did. They shared their video script that they would ask some questions at the beginning and then solve them one by one Also because their members come from different cities, they would introduce the members by lighting different parts of a map. Although we had scheduled the time for promotion video shooting, we hadn’t settled down the script. After this conversation, we decided to get back and discuss our promotion video plan.

To show the support to each other, we followed their WeChat official account: Feed Family and they did the same in return. In addition, we recommended our followers and our friends to follow them and enlarge their influence.

Team TeMoZerapy (SubCat_Shanghai)’s topic is the establishment of glioma TMZ resistance cell line and reversal of TMZ resistance by targeting PDRG1. Their purpose is to knock down the expression of PDRG1 in glioma cells. We had a very pleasant meetup even though we could only see each other through the cameras.

One thing in common was that both of us would like to demonstrate our project in the form of situation comedy and we agreed that would be more attractive and funny. Since it seems unethical in iGEM to have group members act as patients, TeMoZerapy decided to use the method of metaphor. They showed the declination of drug resistance by the change of the dance performance feedback, etc. In return, we also shared our initial script about acting like taking a class to bring out our project topic.

Both we realize that it is difficult for the public to fully understand our project, but it is also an undeniable challenge we must overcome especially when conducting the social survey. After sharing our experiences with each other, we came to the conclusion that it would be better if we made more preparation for illustrating our project goal and design to people in advance, so their survey results would be more accurate.