Welcome to our communication page! Here you can see the efforts made by our team in communicating with other iGEM teams.

Scientific research is never a closed-door activity, and we placed great emphasis on external communication. We had a lot of communication with the iGEM teams, participated in four online as well as one offline meeting, and also collaborated with several iGEM teams, such as CAFA_China, Peking, HUST-China, BNU-China, FAFU, Tongji_China, BIT, CPU_CHINA, hainanU, OUC, etc. We also put a lot of emphasis on communicating with the public and reaching out to all age groups. For children in kindergarten, we designed a Science Pop-up book Little Bacteria, Big World. Aimed at primary and secondary school students, we created a science video Synthetic Bing Dwen Dwen. Targeting on junior and senior high school students, we held an online classroom. For university students and the public, they could gain a deeper understanding of synthetic biology through the TAP Synbio-art Workshop. For ourselves, we have been able to communicate with Bluepha, a company in the field of synthetic biology, to gain a more systematic and in-depth understanding of synthetic biology.

Meetings

We participated in four online iGEM team meetups: CCiC table conference ：hardware（held by BIT）,iGEM Meeting Up (presented by CPU_CHINA, HiZJU-China, ZJUintl-China, ZJUT-China , ZJU-China), iGEM North-South Forum Conference(present by Sustech-EMB), 2022 iGEM Beijing offline meeting (presented by iBowu-China).

And we also participated in CCiC 9^th (the 9^th Conference of China iGEMer Community). During these meetups, we presented our project and listed the problems we encountered at that time, and discussed them with the professors and other teams. We also built up connection with BNU-China, FAFU, Tongji_China, BIT, CPU_CHINA, hainanU, OUC and other igem teams. In CCiC 9^th, we won the Best Presentation, Best Genetic Element Design and Best Software.

With Other iGEM Teams

We are actively engaged in collaboration with other teams. We met individually with CAFA_China, Peking, HUST-China, BNU-China, FAFU, Tongji_China, BIT, CPU_CHINA, hainanU, and OUC to give suggestion to each other on the significance of the project and the experimental design. In the process of discussion, we also had partnership with CAFA_China, FAFU, HUST-China.

Synthetic Bing Dwen Dwen

During the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics, the mascot Bing Dwen Dwen has become very popular. We took this opportunity to create a video: Synthetic Bing Dwen Dwen, hoping to use the popular image of Bing Dwen Dwen to make more people aware of synthetic biology.

Comments and pop-ups on various platforms indicated that the video clearly conveyed the concept of synthetic biology to the public with its humorous language, combined with the popular mascot, Bing Dwen Dwen. Some users hoped that we can produce videos like this to open up channels for the public to learn about cutting-edge subjects such as synthetic biology.

Science Pop-up Book

In collaboration with CAFA_China, we have produced a book for children on synthetic biology. With simple language and rich design of three-dimensional pages (paper models), the book vividly shows the basic concepts and application scenarios of synthetic biology to little readers, and guides them to think about synthetic biology-related issues. The book starts from a macroscopic view of biology, introduces the concept of cell, and then guides little readers to understand the concept of "gene" and its role in the biological process. After that, we lead the them to think about the possibility of changing genes to alter biological traits, which naturally leads to the concept of synthetic biology. We use various paper models to explain the basic techniques of synthetic biology to little readers and to show the relevant applications of synthetic biology. We also ask open-ended questions throughout the book to guide them to have their own thoughts and judgments on issues related to synthetic biology (including safety issues of synthetic biology).

Learn more about it in our Education page.

Online Charity Classroom

Our team, Tsinghua, together with Peking, FAFU, BIT, BNU-China, Tongji_China, CPU_CHINA, JLU-China, SUSTech_Shenzhen, and ShanghaiTech_China run an Online Charity Classroom to deliver synthetic biology to high school students. We also built partnership with BIODO MENTOR (an education company) as a way to get better promotion. We have designed the lectures to follow the hot topics of CHSBO (China High School Biology Olympiad) and the frontiers of synthetic biology, taking the project content of each iGEM team as an example and talking about the principles and applications of each synthetic biology technology in depth.

The course is divided into four sections: synthetic biology in life, design the protein you want, how bacteria see the light and build a cell factory. Each section is taught by one or more teams.

According to the feedbacks, most of the students were positive about our course and felt that they had learned a lot. A number of students hoped that we could offer more courses of this kind to provide them with a channel to learn about synthetic biology.

TAP Synbio-art Workshop

TAP Synbio-Art Workshop is a bio-art workshop launched by Tsinghua, CAFA China and Peking iGEM teams, which invites researchers, scientists and artists in the field of bio-art and synthetic biology to participate in the discussion.

We held a series of activities to discuss the ethics of synthetic biology, artificial life and natural life, the responsibility of bio-art and many other topics. The goal was to promote the joint creation of the three teams through the discussion, and to arouse the public's concern and participation in the bio-art issues in the process.

Learn more about it in our Education page.

On 8 July 2022, our team had a visit of Bluepha. Frank Lee, Director of Strategic Research and Development of Bluepha, gave us an overview of the development of Bluepha Microbiology and analysed the opportunities, future and advantages of the synthetic biology industry from Bluepha's perspective. Also, one of the co-founders of Bluepha, Teng Li, gave us valuable advice on team building and the design of our projects for iGEM this year. He encouraged us to enjoy the game, which was a nice try regardless of the result. He also said that any team will go through four periods when completing a project: start-up, adjustment, stabilisation and maturity. And learning to adjust our morale and output during the different periods of transition will allow us to truly enjoy the journey.