COLLABORATION
XMU-China
XMU-China is the third runner up in the 2020 Finalists and has a lot of experience in competing. We got in touch with the Xiamen University iGEM team in July and went to Xiamen University for an offline exchange. Our project was very incomplete at that time, and the enthusiastic XMU-China team shared their experience in HP, experimentation, and art. They also introduced us to College of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, Xiamen University’s Prof. Chen-Yun Guo. The professor showed us around the lab and evaluated our experimental protocols. After the meeting, we immediately adjusted our project logo and Human Practice work plan. Comics are a very popular reading material. It is easy to convey information to readers in a graphic format. We invited five iGEM teams from China, including XMU-China and BIT, to draw a comic on the theme of synthetic biology. Once completed, we posted them on social media platforms, hoping to have a greater social impact. At the end, our two teams exchanged gifts as a souvenir. We hope XMU-China will have a good year!
Figure 1. XMU-China team members communicate with FAFU team members
Figure 2. Professor Chenyun Guo leads FAFUers on a tour of Xiamen University laboratories
Figure 3. Professor Chen-Yun Guo discusses with Sibo Jiao and Zhonglin Cao
OUC-China
Ming Chi and Jingwen Zhang from OUC-China are former classmates in our team, so we got in touch back in April and held our first online meeting. During the meeting, OUC-China showed us the progress of their project in 2022 and we showed them the direction of our selection for this year. At the same time, we discussed the artistic aspects of the project with OUC-China, including the logo and the poster. We have also co-organised a number of educational dissemination activities in Shandong Province.
On July 2, FAFU and OUC-China held an online meeting. The two teams first made a brief introduction to their own projects and asked questions and suggested the problems existing in each other's projects. For the unresolved issues with the FAFU team circuit. The OUC-China made some recommendations and promised to provide suicide genes to address FAFU safety issues. At the same time, we needs to conduct experiments to verify the performance of the suicide part. And share the data with OUC-China. We also confirmed the future cooperation between HP and artists on Wechat tweets, promotion of comics and videos. And collaborate on modeling protein interactions. The teams also set their plans for the future.
Figure 4.FAFUer and OUC-China team members in a meeting together
NEU-China
During the project development phase, we identified the theme of global pandemics. However, we could not find a good entry point. At this point we learned that NEU-China had already implemented COVID-19 theme in 2021 with good results. So we contacted them and discussed in depth how to improve their project. This broadened our thinking. After that, we also worked together on HP, mathematical modeling, and artwork.
Figure 4.FAFUer and NEU_CHINA team members in a meeting together
Meet
We participated in an iGEM online meetup organised by four universities including Guangxi University in July. We shared our ideas of how we would like to make comics and some of our partners joined us in making a synthetic biology comic book.
We participated in the CCiC (Conference of China iGEMer Community) in August. We made a PowerPoint and a poster to show our progress at that time.
Synthetic Biology Lectures
Tsinghua University invited us to co-host an online joint science talk in July. We invited a total of ten iGEM teams from the China region to deliver the lecture. Tsinghua and FAFU produced promotional articles in the early stages and our articles were read by 1603 people. Below is the content of our lectures. The other teams' sessions were just as good, but we have not sought their permission, so we have only provided the FAFU PDF.
Finally, we took the internet avatars of all the spectators, as well as the school logos of each team's school A postcard was made and sent to each student as a souvenir..
Synthetic Biology Comic
In July, we prepared a synthetic biology comic book and FAFU invited BIT, XMU-China, Jiangnan-China, OUC-China and NEFU-China to draw this excellent comic book. All teams discussed their drawing experiences and progress every week. After finishing the book, we took a group photo and FAFU sent the comic book to the WeChat public platform. It was a great success! It attracted thousands of readers from all over the world
Figure 8. Synthetic Biology Comics Reading Numbers
Figure 9.Geographical distribution and age distribution of readers of synthetic biology comics.
Figure 10. Group photo of all participating teams
