In order to contribute to the treatment of genetic disease, our team aims to optimize CRISPR-Casposon technology in gene editing. Our commitment is to empower this technology to make it more effective and reliable to modify genes and further treat a wider range of diseases.

Gene editing is a complicated topic especially when it comes to human beings. To get close to the public, we believe it helps to introduce some basic knowledge about gene editing to the public. After that, we could further gradually deliver more information about CRISPR, about genetic diseases to get them more familiar with the core technology and main topic of our project.

For this purpose, we utilized some educational materials, like articles and videos, to get outreach to people outside the relevant area.

According to our survey, nowadays more people prefer reading online articles for acquiring knowledge. So we chose WeChat as the main online channel for posting educational articles and communicating with our followers who are interested in our project. We applied for a WeChat Official Account and the name is “ATCG战队” (Team ATCG) which people could easily search and follow for updates on our team. Besides some posts on our team's daily work, we launched a series of educational articles.

Our first article was published on July 12th, 2022, with 269 reads and 18 likes. In this article, We introduced ourselves to the public, including our team logo and project goal. To make it simpler for our followers to read, we took more time to draft the part introducing the experimental design of our solution. In addition, we quoted a story about the first gene-edited organism by Paul Berg (1973) and the first gene-edited animal, a mouse by Rudolf Jaenisch (1974) in order to trigger the interest of our followers to read. Following that story, we further introduced some important application fields of gene editing technology, including medical science, the production industry, science research, and gene therapy to deliver the message that gene editing is not far away from our social life.

At the end of the page, we shared two figures with our followers, one of which is the basic pathway of gene editing and the other is a scientific popularization drawing about GMO food. Since GMO food we think is the topic people will talk about in daily life, this might help to shorten the distance between public and gene editing technology.

After we have brought "gene editing" to the public, we decided to talk about CRISPR technology. People might hear of this word since CRISPR/Cas9 has been awarded Nobel Prize in 2020. So we started with a figure to demonstrate how CRISPR-CAS works on gene editing. Then we talked about the development history of CRISPR and pointed out that people started to utilize this technology in the medical field and how gene editing could be used to treat genetic diseases. after this, we pointed out that there still exists some challenges in CRISPR technology and one of the challenges is the Off-target problem which is exactly what our project aims to solve. At last, we also made some comparisons between CRISPR and other gene editing technologies to leave space for people who might want to dig more on their own.

As we stated in our first article, our concerning issue is the treatment of those genetic diseases. In this article, we introduced three types of genetic diseases and their impact briefly: chromosomal disorders, monogenic disorders, and polygenic disorders. The main content of this article is about current medical strategies or treatments for curing genetic diseases. There are several common-used methods, like diet therapy to treat hereditary glucose 6-phosphate dehydrogenase deficiency, medication therapy to treat hepatolenticular degeneration, and surgical operation to treat spherocytosis. At the end of the page, we pointed out that these solutions don’t reach the root causes and there are still many genetic diseases without absolutely valid therapies. Thus, following that gene therapy was mentioned, which could completely eliminate the existence of genetic diseases through gene editing technology the most competitive technology is CRISPR and it is what our team is working on.

Our education video starts with talking about the movie character of Spider-Man to bring public the theme of human beings' gene editing. Then we explained gene programming by referring to biological evolution and using animations to demonstrate the result of gene editing technology. The second half of the video illustrates how is gene editing and quotes news in 2018 that the twin babies, Lulu and Nana who had been gene-edited were born and were claimed naturally resistant to HIV. At last, we mentioned that even though CRISPR technology has its capability of gene editing, it still has some flaws, like the risk of being "off-target", then our team is working on solving this issue and making this technology more controllable and stable.

In order to let more people see this video and pay attention to our topic as well as our solution, this video has been inserted with a bilingual caption and launched on Bili Bili and Youtube to cover the viewers in China and abroad.In order to let more people see this video and pay attention to our topic as well as our solution, this video has been inserted with a bilingual caption and launched on Bili Bili and Youtube to cover the viewers in China and abroad.