Informing the public of synthetic biology and raising awareness of anti-aging problems is equally important to our team as engineering success. Our team combines various forms of public education and targeted a diverse range of people. By doing so, we hope to improve the public’s acceptance of synthetic biology, increase the public’s knowledge of the traditional Chinese herbal plants, and raise awareness on how to resist aging healthily and naturally.
We created and ran two different social media official accounts to reach out to different audiences. Through vlogs, educational articles and calendars, we introduced synthetic biology, Chinese traditional herbal medicine, and our project to the general audience. Our WeChat official account focuses on public education for the general audience, while our RedBook account focuses on showing the fun and creative side of scientific research, engineering and experiments to get rid of the stereotypes associated with synthetic biology.
Herbal Daily is a calendar we designed to introduce one herb per day from August to October. Since the parts we created to synthesize anthocyanin came from the Chinese traditional herb skullcap, we find it important to inform the public about traditional medicine. Chinese herbal medicines and its secondary metabolites are also an important source of synthetic biology gene bank, so we added information like useful compounds and possible use in genetic engineering to exemplify the use of synthetic biology in daily products. Incorporating the function, classification and fun facts about a herb with the unique form of an aesthetically pleasing and concise calendar, we managed to spread the knowledge of Chinese herbs while interacting with our audience on a daily basis.
While interacting with our audience, our team aims to display the fun and creative side of synthetic biology-synthetic biology isn’t all about boring labs and incomprehensible paperwork, it is fun, creative while being very beneficial to society. Therefore, we released a series of vlogs (8) recording our experience at the laboratory. We produced interesting content about our experiment, our team’s interactions, and the arboretum our lab is located in. After attracting new audience with elements like “beautiful lab in Shanghai’s biggest arboretum” and “high schooler vlogs”, we explained the basic concepts of synthetic biology, plants, and our project, therefore educating the public in a fun and interactive way.
We took the platform of WeChat official account to the biggest advantage and released educational articles two or three times per month. With beautiful design and interesting content, these articles helped our team develop our story. We introduced the concept of genetic engineering and anti-aging in more depth, providing our audience who grew interested with our content with specific information. We also make sure that the articles are pleasing and easy to read so readers can learn about in-depth content in an easy way.
Working with phototrophs is rewarding and challenging at the same time. When we heard ASU and UBCO are working on building the Phototroph community, we immediately thought this is a good idea, and join them as the only high school team this year. Together, we want to expand the use of phototrophs in synthetic biology.
The Phototroph community organized a variety of meet-ups with teams presenting their project and experts giving advice. Though we cannot participate meetups sometimes due to timezone constraints, we still benefited a lot from their advice in modeling and implementation. Video Protocol
As high school students, our knowledge of working with phototrophs is relatively limited compared to undergraduates and overgraduates. We learned a lot about phototrophs through the phototroph handbook that the phototroph community last year has made.
During the meet-up series, we came up with ideas to further the work done by predecessors of the phototroph community. Together with xx iGEM teams, we made a series of video protocols to better demonstrate how experiments are carried out. We can imagine how the video protocol would serve as a reference in working with phototrophic chassis through clear and easily understandable illustrations of our project.
We were excited to make the agrobacterium transformation video protocol using the knowledge of our project.
View our contribution through the handbook!
We designed a free "Plant Biology For All" Course on Udemy, packed with dense quizzes and Coursework. By creating this free course, we hope to make biology, especially new fields of biology like synthetic biology accessible for everyone. This course is for anyone who is interested in plants. Not only does this course teach basic concepts like the plant cell, it also introduces synthetic biology and prepares the students for taking more classes harder than this one.
Recognizing that there is a gap in Biology Education between regions, we designed a kids-friendly course with 4 units, specifically aiming to educate underprivileged kids aged 6-10 in Yunnan, China. We also designed many educational games to make it more engaging. We hope to educate these kids about plant biology and help them grow into people who has inquisitiveness to their exterior world.
We conducted a series of activities to help future iGEMers participate better in the competition. After we participated in iGEM, we understand that it may be very hard for students who are interested in synthetic biology to come up with a topic and complete the experiment all on their own. Therefore, we wanted to help them have a better competition experience by introducing our project and the details we found out during our experience. We also received helpful feedback from the students, therefore improving our own project.
Here’s their project ideas that we help them to come up!
Together with the other six teams, we successfully conducted an online live broadcast for the public via WeChat app on July 10 after co-planning and organization.
It was intended to let the public know about projects in synthetic biology. At the same time, there is a first mutual understanding between the team. After the project introduction of each team, everyone had an understanding of each other's projects and the public respond actively. This laid foundation for follow-up teamwork.