With BNDS: Plasmids Provision

BNDS provided plasmids including enzyme crtE and crtI respectively, which functioned well in our experiments with a different combination if crtE, crtB, crtI, crtY by pcr. We appreciate their timely help.

With PINGHE: Their Mentors

PINGHE is a high school team from Shanghai. The project they proposed, Plan β, has very close principle similarity and industrial relevance to our project. So, in July, we held two virtual meetings online. First, our team shared a lot of insights to PINGHE on the topic selection, experimental ideas and HP principles; second, we conducted a synthetic biology sharing session, where PINGHE was responsible for sharing the underlying logic of synthetic biology, and then Fudan shared the industrialization forethought of synthetic biology.

With NUDT: Clarifying the Tangled Scale Data

Team NUDT_CHINA focused this year on visualizing invisible stress with the ingenuity and technology of synthetic biology, so they paid much attention to people’s self-perception of stress. For their questionnaire research, they chose a 14-item Perceived Stress Scale (PSS), which has been proven to have high reliability and validity in the literature, to measure the degree to which situations in one’s life are appraised as stressful.[1] However, because the original scale had a mixed picture of the role of each self-assessment item on stress, some items were ambiguous (e.g., it is difficult for the respondents to assess whether “often have you found yourself thinking about things that you have to accomplish ?” represents high or low stress), and the five scales of different perception levels were assigned the same score. At the same time, the Chinese 14-item PSS did not indicate that some items needed to be scored in the reverse direction. Team NUDT_CHINA encountered difficulties analyzing the reliability and validity of the questionnaire and the scale data.

At this time, we provided timely assistance to Team NUDT_CHINA. In the analysis of the reliability and validity of the scale, the Fudan team separated the positive and negative descriptions of stress from the original scale, verified the reliability and validity of the scale from two dimensions, and suggested eliminating the statements with unclear affective tendencies to ensure the reliability and validity of the scale questions. As for the scale data analysis, our member pointed out that the scores assigned to the positive and negative statements should not be the same but the opposite because the scale measures the degree of self-stress perception. The higher the score assigned, the more stressful it is. In the face of equal “never”, “occasionally”, "sometimes ", “sometimes”, “often”, and “always”, the statements that mean "I am very stressed ". We helped Team NUDT_CHINA to adjust the scoring method, and they came up with promising results.

Sparking valuable thinking

We focused on the synthesis of skin care molecules this year, while Team NUDT_CHINA focused on the stressful conditions of the population, giving us a valuable perspective: skin health is greatly affected by stressful situations, so what new skincare behaviors are generating from the increasingly fast-paced life and heavy stress of modern society? Based on this, we redesigned a new questionnaire version and found that “compensatory skin care” and “first aid skin care” are closely related to people’s stressful conditions in the analysis.

Since the purpose of “compensatory skincare” and “first aid skincare” is clear and in this case, consumers may have higher expectations of effectiveness. Therefore, they may be more inclined to focus on skincare products’ efficacy, especially the key active molecules, which will lead them to “efficacious skincare”. This phenomenon is exactly the market trend that every team engaged in the R&D and synthesis of skin care molecules, including us, wants to see.