Annabeth Zhang
Eddy Liu-Lin
Isabel Chang
Jane Zhang
Sophie Zhang
Serena Deng
Tony Sun
Vienna Chen
Yifei Lai
Around 589 million individuals in mainland China were infected with H.pylori along with a 44.2% prevalence according to the research paper Prevalence of Helicobacter pylori infection in China on PubMed. The high numbers make H.pylori infection a worth-noting societal problem in China. Based on our investigation, there are still many people lacking precise awareness of Helicobacter pylori. Therefore, through group discussion, we decided to establish social media accounts, deliver both online and offline lectures, and go out onto the streets to communicate with the public face-to-face for raising social awareness of H.pylori infections and gastric cancer and meantime promoting biosynthesis technology which we utilize to develop a new solution to deal with the H.pylori detection issue.
WeChat is now the most commonly used social media app in China even popular around the world. WeChat Official Account is one of the largest social media platforms in China, with approximately 1.15 billion monthly active users among whom each spends around 80 minutes on the APP every day. The popularity of the WeChat Official Account makes it one of the most ideal social media platforms for us to voice our team's opinions and educate the public on scientific affairs. So we created our team WeChat Official Account by the team name “ProTeenFessionals”.
The post statistics of our WeChat Official Account
We edited some words to say Hi that we briefly introduce ourselves and our project to our new followers by default on WeChat Official Account.
Our first post, “Team Assembling | Detection of Helicobacter pylori based on CRISPR Cas12a Technology”, came out on August 13rd and reached 147 reads so far, consisting of our team introduction, the meaning behind our team name as well as logo, and a brief introduction of the project we are working on.
In order to adjust our article style for better suiting the profile of our followers so as to increase the reads and our impact, we conducted an analysis about the users read our first article. Based on the data, of all the readers who read our first article, 58.82% were female and 41.18% were male. The majority of our readers (around 70%) were either aged between 46 to 60 or were under 18, so we made adjustment about the content we posted afterward. We simplified the scientific terminologies used in our posts and tried to illustrate relevant knowledge by using more examples or graphs so that even those people with little or no related background are still able to understand.
Our second post “Little H On The Run | Have You Seen It?” on the introduction of H.pylori, its harm, and ways to prevent this bacteria have achieved 274 reads in just 4 days. We designed a cartoon character for H.pylori named “Little H” and we characterized it as a “criminal” on the run, accompanied by a detailed yet easy-to-understand explanation of the bacteria and possible solutions if one were ever to be infected with this bacteria.
The post “Little H On The Run | Have You Seen It?”
The third and fourth posts were about the promotion of our fund-raising event and our online lecture, hoping to attract more people to attend. For the lecture promotion, we listed our lecture trailer information and the meeting room code. In addition, we also created a WeChat Chat Group for our audiences to join and communicate with us directly. For the charity sale promotion, we listed the spot and the time of the plaza fundraising and showed photos of our goods to attract potential buyers.
The posts “Little H On The Run | Lecture: How to Prevent Little H” (left) and “Charity Sale | Summer
Romance” (right)
Our fifth article delivered on August 19th was about Synthetic Biology. The article managed to reach 389 reads only one day after it was posted, suggesting people have some interests in biosynthesis and our decision on posting educational articles on WeChat is correct which could help spread the impact of biosynthesis and our project to the general public.
The post “Biosynthesis | Coding the ‘Detector’ in CRISPR”
After the collaboration meetup with the MaiaPotion team (Zhejiang_United), we decided to cooperate with each other to co-publish an article on introducing the CRISPR technology, which e were both utilizing the CRISPR/Cas technology in order to solve our research questions. In this article, we explained what exactly is CRISPR, and how this technology work to affect our lives, including the mechanism behind CRISPR technology, its strength and challenge, and various application of CRISPR.
The co-published post with MaiaPotion (Zhejiang_United) “The Scalpel of God: CRISPR”
Up until August 20th, we now have 195 followers following our WeChat Official Account, with more than 800 views daily, signaling the success of our team in reaching out to the public and lecturing them on our research topic.
Statistical data of our WeChat Official Account
Originally, we didn’t plan to create an Instagram account for iGEM as we were already doing great with our WeChat Official Account. However, the majority of people using WeChat are either from China or other East-Asian countries, which makes our scientific communication and efforts to outreach lack generalization to a wider population. The “i” in iGEM stands for “internationally”, so only posting educational articles and videos on Chinese social media isn’t enough, we wanted to be able to reach out to more potential audiences who are interested in H.pylori and other Biology-related knowledge. Instagram is a great platform for our team to establish cross-culture communication and collaboration, with roughly 1 billion monthly active users located in 170 different countries.
Homepage of our team Instagram
We posted introductions to our team, our research, and team members, along with posters and cartoon drawings. Our followers increased from 0 to 70 within 1 week, and numbers are still growing with our increased efforts. We are hoping to reach 100 followers by the end of October.
Team Weibo account page
We started our Weibo account because compared to WeChat Official Account, it’s much easier to reach a wider public through this platform. However, most users on Weibo would not bother to stop and read a long article on H.pylori or Synthetic Biology. Most of the posts on Weibo were entertaining and short, with lots of pictures and videos to catch the eyes of the public. Besides, we actively forward and comment on those news related to our project so as to outreach to those users who also have interests in the same topic. In response to the unique features of the APP, we mainly posted posters that had few words but lots of cute images, hoping to attract the attention of more people to us and our research. We now have 5364 followers on Weibo.
We got the idea of organizing an online lecture through our first collaboration with MaiaPotion (Zhejiang_United). On the day of our collaboration, August 15th, Maia Potion hold an online lecture in the evening. They advised us that online lectures can provide more inspiration and thinking for our research topic, and it is also a good method to achieve intensive public education.
We decided to use Tencent Meeting app as the platform for online lecturing as it is easily accessible in mainland China and very popular with the public as the pandemic forced children and adults alike into online learning/working. We started by targeting audiences from all age groups and created a very formal and academic poster which has been posted on our WeChat Official Account for promotion. However, after a group discussion, we decided to simply target a certain group of the audience – children of primary school age. This is because targeting audiences of all age groups would be very difficult for us to settle on a certain style of lecturing. With a specific age group, primary school kids, we were able to design an online lecture that is easy to understand and fun.
We were giving a lecture for younger children
We talked about Helicobacter pylori by the character name Little H and we used lots of daily life cases as analogies to explain how H. pylori affect the human body, how it does harm to the health of the stomach, and how we can do to prevent ourselves from their infection, thus our young audiences could be more engaging and understand our topic easier. In addition, we also made efforts on designing our presentation slides for the lecture, to make them fancy by decorating them with cartoon characters and many illustrations.
The mind map at the end of the presentation acted as a small quiz to test how much information the children could remember after the whole lecture and the results turned out to be great that our young audiences seemly very enjoyed the lecture. 29 people in total attended our online lecture, including 3 of our team members who were in charge of delivering the lecture. We would consider this online lecture a great success, as the children appeared to have learned a lot from this lecture according to the judging the quiz, and they were highly engaged throughout the process, asking questions every now and then. In the near future, we might consider promoting this lecture as a mini class that could be delivered to more primary school students for spreading knowledge about our topic.
Our team, ProTeen-fessionals, is made up of 15 high school students coming from the same high school – Shanghai YK Pao high school. We took this advantage and decided to give a brief lecture in our school as a student seminar.
We started with the cancer topic and its hallmarks. Following that we introduced the cancer our project addresses – gastric cancer, and H. pylori. Not only did we talk about our research project but also listen to their opinions.
We were introducing our project progress and H. pylori
As we went fundraising on the streets of Shanghai, we brought along 400 postcards that we have printed in advance and gave them for free to passersby. The postcards were designed to have either our team logo or a cartoon drawing of H.pylori on one side, with an explanation of the potential ways to avoid H.pylori infection or an introduction to our reach topic on the other page.
During our outside activities, we carried our postcards with us and distributed them to the general public. Judging by the reactions of the pedestrians, we are confident to say that people were pleased to learn information about our topic and some of them actively discussed with us what they thought. Through our efforts, we have at least managed to raise the public awareness of H.pylori and contributed to preventing the infection in our very own way.
We printed out two kinds of postcards and distributed to the general public
We also designed and made a roll-up banner to bring to our fundraising in front of our stall. There weren’t a lot of words on the roll-up banner because we knew that most passersby wouldn’t have the time and patience to read through a sophisticated report. So in the roll-up, we briefly introduced our team, our team name, and our project. In addition, we shared the QR code of our WeChat Official Account at the end of the banner so that people could follow our updates and learn more about our project by reading our articles. We enlarged the pictures and the title so as to attract more attention and highlight the key information we wanted to deliver.
The design drawing of our roll-up banner and we set this roll-up near our fundraising spot
