Wechat Official Account
A part of education is our Official Account-HS2022. An introduction of the aim and main focus of our project, and a platform where we share available method for helping with lactose intolerance and conducting surveys. It is used to spread knowledge about lactose intolerance: current treatment, specialized dairy products, population, and its symptoms. We wish to call up public attention to the harm it would made and our project’s future potential to cope with this disorder. Also, record what our iGEM experiment accomplished during the summer.
IGEM CCiC
As a team, we presented our project on Conference of China iGEMer Community, and shared knowledge about lactose intolerance. There, we met with several other teams interested in engineering bacteria to change human’s intestinal microbiome and discussed room for collaboration.
Education in Qibaodwight
The event
In Shanghai Qibaodwight High School, China, we have an authoritative Biology Club. This is a club open to biology lover and who wants to learn more about biology, including the basic knowledge and further studying in some specific fields, in the local community and school. Some senior students offer some helps to the freshmen to better understand the filed that they like.
Our contribution
We use iGem as the entry point to gradually shift to the whole synthetic biology. We introduce the latest results and findings by using synthetic biology, and the wide uses of the synthetic biology. We also illustrate how dose synthetic biology works, and the whole competition criterion of the iGem. Due to they lacking some basic knowledge of DNA, and the structure of bacteria, we are going to present these knowledge and some procedures of synthetic biology, including experiment methods, in the future club activity. We also present our topic to them.
Outcome
We got a lot of positive and instant feedback during the club activity. Club members are impressed by the current technology, and we can we do with synthetic biology. They also very interesting on our topic, as they thought there is no way to solve lactose intolerance, and as some of their parents have the same symptom.
School Seminar in YKPAO School
The Seminar Program:
Each month, YK Pao School holds a seminar in which all students and teachers can attend. During the first month of school, we had the opportunity to bring the first seminar in this semester, and the first seminar about synthetic biology to the whole school, by teaching them about iGEM competition, presenting our project and teaching some basic genetic constructs and methodology used in synthetic biology.
The Process:
On September the 21st, a total of more than 30 student and a handful of teachers attend to our seminar. We first reviewed the discovery and application of Crisper technology by introducing the students to sgRNA, Cas protein, and the different repair mechanisms used for different organisms and purposes. Then we examined different gene constructs—permanent and temporal reporters, Cre-loxP used for temporal knockouts, and proteins typically used for positive and negative selection. We end the seminar by reading several recent papers in synthetic biology, teaching paper reading skills and data interpretation.
The outcome:
The feedback was very positive, the students loved how academic and challenging the seminar is. Some of the feedbacks also highlighted our strength and areas of improvement in presentation skills. Several students informed me their willingness to have similar lectures in the future, and that they will recommend the lecture to their friends—some suggested to start a synthetic biology club to specifically hold iGEM related lectures and experiments.
