Overview
During this year's iGEM project, we were given many opportunities to work together. On the one hand, we made great efforts to communicate with other teams, presented our projects and listened to their suggestions. We not only jointly held two meetups with SHSBNU_China, but also participated in the Beijing iGEMer Meetup held by BUCT. Secondly, we collaborated with KEYSTONE team to jointly carry out education activities for publicizing our synthetic biology ideas, which includes the Bio-Doodle and the WeChat official account we ran together; Thirdly, we actively sought help in the experimental part, contacted the team of Peking to help us detect the results of bacterial induced expression, so we confirmed the reliability of our previous conclusion. Finally, in order to prepare for the final Jamboree, we also held a small Jamboree in-person as a final rehearsal before Paris.
Meetup collaboration
Held two meetups withSHSBNU_China
June 26: First meetup
This year, we jointly held a large-scale meetup with the team of SHSBNU_China. In the beginning of June, we came up with an idea to build a platform for discussion between teams, we talked this idea with SHSBNU_China and our meetup was decided to hold on June 26. Our team members were excited, so we started to publicize before the meetup, we also made good plans and debugged softwares.
Because of the pandemic, we had to discuss online. A total of 20 teams participated in our meetup, including both domestic and foreign participants, as well as high school and university teams. We also invited iGEM Asian ambassador Heng Shi for comments and discussions. During the meeting, each team was given 10 min to give a presentation, followed by audience questions and discussions for 2min. Most of the participates were all well-prepared, especially the university teams, we were amazed by their idea and data.
It was also worth noting that after the meeting, we designed a dedicated time for concentrated discussion between the participating teams, to conduct experimental design or communication on cooperative relationships. A small meeting could be established between several participants to discuss. Many teams found partners on our meetup and gained more support and help.Finally, we recorded the whole process of the meeting and fed back the video to each team. We hoped the speech and questions would help them make more improvement. We also uploaded these videos to the open video channel Bilibili, an analog of Youtube to young people in China. All uploaded materials are free for everyone, so people interested in synthetic biology watch and learn about synthetic biology project and iGEM. So far, all the videos have been played more than 1000 times.
August 26: Second meetup
Into August, we have put a lot of effort in our experiment. One day, our partner SHSBNU_China team contacted with us and told us “after the first meeting, a lot of positive feedbacks were received.” “Many teams felt very helpful to the last meetup, and hoped to have more opportunities to discuss.” We are flattered and therefore, we decided to hold the second meetup on August 26, exactly two month later. This meeting was an offline roundtable discussion, and we named it iGEM Beijing Regional Roundtable Meetup.
We listed two major highlight: • A Squad from 10+ Different High Schools • A Union across China and US Schools
In this meeting, we communicated with participants face to face. We shared the progress and encouraged each other, we also provided each other with resources and help. We all felt cheerful and helpful.
Experimental collaboration
iGEM Team Peking helped us test protein expression.
This year, we planned to express the enzymes needed for the production of astragalin in E.coli. We explored the bacterial expression conditions during the experiment and contacted Peking to complete the experiment together with us.
Peking helped us test the protein expression under different IPTG induction concentrations, and the IPTG induction concentrations varied in a gradient between 0.125-2 ug/ml. The experimental results are shown in the figure. Unfortunately, team Peking did not express the protein. After analyzing the reason, we thought that the concentration of IPTG was too low to start the protein expression. After obtaining the experimental results, we increased the concentration of IPTG and completed the protein expression in the subsequent experiments.
Education collaboration
Designed and finished Bio-doodle with KEYSTONE
Bio-doodle is an interactive, educative, transcending coloring book that sparks the light of interest for active learners. By creating this interactive coloring book and mainly distributing it in China, we want to increase the general population’s exposure to Synthetic Biology in a fun but informative manner, and raise people’s interests in this field, in the hope of aggrandizing the team of young Syn Bio lovers and help foster their interests for their future careers.
Last year, our team had drawn a primary version of Bio-doodle. This year, we took this idea and made it a new version Bio-doodle 2.0 together with KEYSTONE.
Firstly, we paid attention to every aspect and details of the book to make sure our product is considerate for the targeted range of students. In order to do so, we provided vocabulary pages with terms and definitions after each concept we introduce. Our writers used relatively more comprehensible and straight-forward tone and diction in body paragraphs of the content. We also used different fonts of words and various eye-catching colors in illustrations to grab the attention of the readers, who, like many primary school students, are easily distracted from tasks like reading a book sedentarily.
Next, although we are facing primarily to primary and middle schoolers, we welcome everyone to dive into the fascinating world of synthetic biology with our BioDoodle 2.0 version. As the majority of members of our team are located in Che language set up of this educational coloring book is primarily English, with a few Chinese words noted to act as explanations for complex concepts. Besides, in BioDoodle 2.0, illustrations of concepts, such as cell organelles, are given in colored versions and versions with contour lines only, all along with literal explanations of their function and structure. The illustrations with contour lines are there to offer an opportunity for students to do hands-on work in the process of understanding and learning concepts in a way that reinforces their memories on them.
Bio-doodle is a rewarding activity after which students would feel a sense of accomplishment, thereby increasing their interest to continue reading and even exploring more about biology and synthetic biology beyond this book. Moreover, the act of coloring is also therapeutic for children and adolescents, especially when certain individuals have no outlet for unpleasant or confusing emotions. This offers inclusivity and a calming media for children who might accumulated stress throughout their days of hard work at school.
Education collaboration
WeChat official account ran together with KEYSTONE
Our project this year paid attention to the disease of Alzheimer's disease (AD). In our earlier HP, we noticed that many people did not have a clear cognition of this disease. The initial symptom of AD was memory impairment, which was always considered as a normal manifestation of old age, so as to ignore this early symptom. Not until the later stage of the disease developed to severe visual spatial skills impairment and executive dysfunction began to seek medical treatment and examination. Therefore, in order to enhance people's awareness of this disease, we jointly run a Wechat public account with KEYSTONE, where we conducted popular science on Alzheimer's disease and encourage the public to know and understand this disease. We planned to continue the popular science work of Alzheimer's disease in the future.
Meetup collaboration
Participated in meetup held by BUCT.
On 12th of August, BUCT hosted a meetup for teams to discuss safety issues in synthetic biology. In this event, we learned about the safety concerns from many other iGEM teams, and we reflected on our proposed strategy of using Astragalin. We are glad the project is safety from many aspects, and we also learned there are many regulation concerns and procedures to go through even for safe products to be used as medicine and to be sold on the market. We later put more consideration into this aspect.
Pre-jamboree.
In October, we entered the final stage of the competition. All the students felt nervous, we felt a little bit timid for the unfamiliar competition environment and did not know how to answer different kinds of questions. In order to show the project in a better way and ease our nervousness, we held the pre-jamboree. We invited schoolteachers and students to join our activity. Some people were very familiar with our two projects, some of them had never been involved in projects, and there are also some junior students who had even never know about biology, we gave a presentation and asked for some advice. We do think the pre-jamboree is a great way to give us confidence.
Due to COVID-19, none of our teams from China were able to travel to Paris to participate in the live competition, so we also had a pre-debate and poster session at this event to make up for this. This event was jointly organised with Keystone and we also invited four teams from BIT-China, SHSBNU_China, Tsinghua and BJEA to participate in this offline Pre-Jamboree, which also served as a closing event for the previous two meetups.
INTO THE DIMENSIONLESS
The "INTO THE DIMENSIONLESS" Earth Life Art Exhibition opens at the Beijing Enjoy-Art Museum on 6 October 2022.
A total of 109 creators have been invited to work in this exhibition, featuring artworks in different media such as painting, installation, and video, exploring the mysteries of life from multiple perspectives around topics such as science, genetics and the environment. Amongst the many entries, we received wonderful entries from two teams, LZU-China and SHSBNU.
