Human Practices
This summer our team has been exploring mRNA and dtRNA involved in protein synthesis that could be integrated into the field of synthetic biology and genetic engineering. Through research and multiple interviews and surveys, we found out that many biologists, especially (pre)iGEMers, have had problems building complex, stable systems in Gene cloning. As a result, our team introduces new biological parts to control the rate of mRNA degradation as well as to increase gene expression without a cellular metabolic burden. It provides iGEMers with an accessible and convenient toolbox and significantly reduces instabilities when converting, cloning, and building systems, which would be incredibly beneficial to scientists, the community, and the world. On top of that, our team also conducted education activities and adopted multiple advertising ways to promote our program and popularize synthetic biology. These human practice efforts were conducted to contribute to synthetic biology and the community of iGEM, which is also the major goal of our project.
Education
Since our program’s content has little to do with the general public, conducting educational activities was initially a difficult part for us. After serious consideration and brainstorming, we decided to put our educational emphasis on the popularization of synthetic biology, advertisement of iGEM, and interesting activities
we chose students from Shanghai New Epoch Bilingual School as the audience of our educational activities and introduced the iGEM competition to them. This school did not have many students who have strong interests in biology, which was shown by the small size of the AP Biology class. Also, students in this school did not have the experience of participating in iGEM before, making it an ideal audience for our education. By introducing in-depth biological topics, the area of synthetic biology, current business trends, and career possibilities of this realm to students of various age groups, we effectively evoke students' yearning for biology and interest in synthetic biology. Some students were especially interested in the application of synthetic biology in business and industries. We introduced them to various beauty products and emerging industries gained from the interview with a biochemical company's manager. The reason behind these topics was our primary purpose and aspiration: to contribute to the area of synthetic biology, advance academic research, and benefit the community of iGEMers by introducing a new part to adjust RNA’s rate of degradation within cells and making their experiments easier.
We also held small seminars inside Pinghe campus, facing Grade 10 and 11 students who're into iGEM. The seminar introduces iGem in general and features interactive Q&A session where our team answer different questions asked.
Interview and questionnaire
Interviews help us understand societal expectations, acceptance, and influence on our project effectively, which might be the most significant as well as intriguing part. It actually was a challenging process for HP members to determine whom we should interview. The interviewees firstly definitely should be someone who works in the synthetic biology industry or those related. Secondly, they would either give us extra tips for improving our experimental process or offer us valuable opinions as individuals in society. In this way, we invited three different types of stakeholders to do our interviews: biologists/iGEMers, leaders, and biochemical companies.
For instance, we interviewed teachers from other high school iGEM teams, such as Mr. Zhu. Here is some advice we received in general:
1）iGEM might be the first time high schoolers do high-level experiments. Due to clumsiness and awareness of lab rules, many random errors were produced. They suggest letting the professional experiment teacher lead and supervise high school teams to do the experiment step by step.
2) When something is wrong with the experiment, teams could always conduct controlled experiments to troubleshoot the problems. In fact, one edge of high school teams is that they have enough members to plan, arrange, and carry out the experiments.
3）According to a product manager from Blupha, a synthetic biology company, the modulation of degradation rates and the enhancement of protein expression can lower the production cost of many biochemical products. The high costs and the long time required for some synthetic biological products are two of the major problems faced by many companies. However, in order to increase our program's business potential, we still need to be more specific about our result's functions in industrial production processes.
Figure 1. representative photo during the interviews
The targeted recipients of our questionnaire as well as the order of questions also have been considered carefully. To make more people complete the survey, we listed multiple questions, in the beginning, followed by several rating problems. Obviously, an easy question is put at last. It turns out very effective, and pretty much 95% of the recipients answered the open question. According to the survey, 45% think our project would be helpful to their projects, and 40% are considering using our part in the future. 82% believe our project would pose an important impact on the iGEM community and synthetic biology area. Those data built up our confidence and is definitely an accurate reflection of the significance of our idea.
Figure 2. Our questionnaire and results
Advertisement
We chose the most commonly used social media in China, WeChat, as our major advertisement platform. By creating an Official Account, we regularly update posts about our program review, team introduction, and fun knowledge about synthetic biology. These contents are proven to be interesting and attractive by an increasing number of readers. This platform allows a wider public to know more about the iGEM community and the realm of synthetic biology.
Figure 3. The article we wrote on our Wechat official account for better spread of synthetic biology, the iGEM competition, and our team