Welcome to our Education page! Here you can see the efforts made by our team in promoting synthetic biology.

The public is still largely unfamiliar with synthetic biology, and the fact that synthetic biology itself is a cutting-edge discipline makes it too high a barrier to its popularization. But synthetic biology, in its essence, is about using synthetic biology technique to solve practical problems. The advantages of synthetic biology may lie in its sustainability, friendliness, etc., but these are not well known. So, as an iGEM team, we have made various efforts to promote synthetic biology. We have produced science pop-up books, run online charity classroom and bio-art exhibitions with other schools. You can view the details below. We also communicate with synthetic biology company Bluepha to gain an insight into the opportunities, future and strengths of the synthetic biology industry.

Our five activities covered a wide range of people. The Science Pop-up book Little Bacteria, Big World was designed for children in kindergarten. The science video Synthetic Bing Dwen Dwen was aimed at primary and secondary school students. Our online classroom was aimed at junior and senior high school students. For university students and the public, they could gain a deeper understanding of synthetic biology through the TAP Bio-art Exhibition. 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.

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.

We mainly uploaded the videos to the Bilibili video platform, on which the statistics are as follows. In addition, we upload videos to video platforms such as Tiktok, Watermelon Video, Podcast, etc. Considering the visually impaired group, we also upload audio to audio software such as Himalayan FM and Lychee FM for all-round placement.

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.

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).

We also analyzed our pop-up books using the Bloom model^[1], as shown in the table below. Our pop-up books basically cover the four major cognitive domains in the model.

This is the final result of our science pop-up book Little Bacteria, Big World!

Our science pop-up book begins with an introduction to cells and microorganisms for children, taking them on a journey to explore the mysteries in cells. Each page of the book has a three-dimensional section, which is constructed to help children understand cells. There are also interesting interactive tricks to make reading more fun for children.

Let's follow the motion picture and experience our science pop-up book Little Bacteria, Big World!

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. Here are the details of each section.

Before the course, we designed and released a pre-lecture questionnaire. We counted the location of the audience as well as information such as their age, their interest in biology and the results are shown in the graph. At the same time, we collected information on what the students wanted to know. According to statistics, most students needed an introduction of synthetic biology, genetics and molecular biology, and some wanted an introduction to biotechnology. There were also a few students who wanted to learn about CHSBO and iGEM.

The total number of people in the course group was 478, of which 227 joined the QQ group and 251 joined the WeChat group. WeChat publicity was read by 1,566 prople. 449 users attended the Tencent conference in total, of which 132, 62, 212 and 43 attended the four sections. The third section, which of our team's main site, had the most users attending the conference online. We also broadcasted live on Bilibili, with a total of 426 minutes on air, 597 cumulative views, 311 pop-ups, 47.4 hours of cumulative effective viewing time, 140 new fans and 19.4 RMB in reward. We recorded each session as a video and uploaded it to the Bilibili video platform after the course, the recorded video has 4380 views, 507 favorites and 231 likes.

We also collected feedback at the end of the course. 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. We conducted a raffle at the end of the course for all the participants to appreciate their hardworking during the course.

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.

In the first workshop, we, CAFA-China and Peking got further understanding of each other's project and dug out questions behind our projects. We then invited a number of artists in the field of bioart to share their experiences of curating bioart exhibitions. Through this process, we gained a better understanding of each other and developed initial curation ideas based on the issues behind our projects. After learning the experience of bioart curation, we began to refine our curatorial proposals and had a series of discussions to come up with a final proposal. Our original plan was to held an offline exhibition before wiki freeze. However, due to time limitation, we are still negotiating with the exhibition hall, so we are only able to present our curatorial proposal. But we are confident that we will be able to run a successful offline exhibition afterward.

Here is our detailed curatorial plan.

In the exhibition, the part of our team is divided into three small parts: background introduction, related research and our project itself. For the background introduction, we first brought microscopes into the exhibition hall so that visitors could visually observe the morphology of normal and abnormal sperm. The second exhibit is the Sperm quality status wall, a huge wall with hundreds of sperm models neatly arranged, but only 20% of the sperm are colored, indicating that only such a small percentage of sperm are of good quality. The exhibit is intended to use the visual comparison of the number of qualified and unqualified sperm on the huge wall to shock visitors and make them aware of the current situation of poor sperm quality. The third exhibit in the background section is Landscape spermatozoa, which simulates the scene of sperm being visited when they are "on the verge of extinction". In the second part, we plan to make a large fan adjustment knob with corresponding activities on the knob. The fan will blow different sizes of wind, and the speed of the sperm tail will change. This is now an exploration of the causes of sperm quality decline. And in the last part, our project itself, we want to show the whole process of sperm quality testing with our chip via AR technology.

As for CAFA-China, they designed the circuit according to the death switch, and opened the downstream T4 holins and T4 lysozyme with the arabinose promoter pBAD to make the bacteria punch and lysozyme. At the same time, the lacZ gene was added to make the bacteria produce β-galactosidase in the body and the substrate X-Gal and IPTG produced blue color reaction. They use the experiment to complete their art project: the tears of the eyes of horus. As the solution mixes, the bacteria die and turn blue, dripping slowly from the container like giant tears falling from sky. On the macro level, it is an apocalyptic aesthetic presented by death of countless cells. It reflects their discussion of bioethics.

For Peking, they target the problem of drug resistance in bacteria. There are five efflux pump superfamilies in bacteria, of which the RND superfamily plays a key role in the generation of multidrug resistance in Gram-negative bacteria. And AcrB, a component of RND, is widely present and becomes their target. They want to achieve the disruption of bacterial resistance by disrupting the function of AcrB. Their exhibition is mainly on thinking about the problems arising from the proliferation of antibiotics. For example, for the short peptide EPI, which inhibits AcrB, they made the EPI molecular structure lamp band.

At the beginning of October (near the wiki freeze!), we participated in the Biology Art Exhibition organized by iBowu-China. We set up our own booth in the exhibition hall and introduced our own projects to the visitors who came to the exhibition. Through this event, we introduced the current situation of male reproductive health and related scientific knowledge to the public, and received feedback from the visitors.

On 8 July 2022, our team had a visit of Bluepha. Founded in 2016, Bluepha is a national high-tech enterprise based on synthetic biotechnology for molecular and material innovation, dedicated to designing, developing, manufacturing and marketing novel bio-based molecules and materials to help B-side customers in a wide range of industries, including consumer goods, food, medical, agricultural and industrial, to differentiate themselves in their industries.

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. At a time when molecular and material innovation is stagnant on the supply side and new ways of producing molecular materials and substances are being called for on the demand side, synthetic biology can bring new solutions. In addition, Frank introduced different product development models and business pathways in synthetic biology, laying out a map of the synthetic biology field.

Finally, 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.

[1] BS Bloom, DR Krathwohl, BB Masia．Bloom's taxonomy of educational objectives: Pearson Education，1984