Team:Hong Kong-CUHK/Public Engagement

On August 15th - 17th, 2018, the Chinese University of Hong Kong and the South China University of Technology co-organized the first Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Great Bay Area iGEM Synthetic Biology Development Forum. The forum is a Synthetic biology topic forum which aims to deepen the regional cooperation among Guangdong, Hong Kong and Macao and promote the development of synthetic biology education. The forum was held in the Chinese University of Hong Kong, which the theme was: “Rewriting the Genetic Codes - the Development of Synthetic Biology in A New Era". During the forum, team presentation, poster sessions, guest talks and debates were carried out. Guest speakers and debate judges include Professor CHAN King Ming, Professor CHENG Hon Ki Christopher, Professor Hong XUE, Professor CHAN Ting Fung, and iGEM Asian Ambassador CHEN Hong. The event itself was a great success, the bond and connection between the iGEM team of the Greater Bay area of China was stronger, we each understood and appreciated others’ projects in a better manner.

Art Fair 2018, 2019

CUHK Art fair is an annual carnival which gathers the whole university to celebrate the diversity of our organizations including societies, clubs, associations etc. In this event, we were honored to distribute the concept of iGEM and synthetic biology, we presented our work and progress, recruited students from different majors to join the upcoming-year team. We prepared nitrogen made ice cream and questionnaires about the students understanding on Genetically Modified Food and Bananas and Xcm diseases for our project human practice analysis. We documented the contact numbers of people who are interested to join and later on organized a briefing session to provide further information.

Meet up with the University of Macau

On July 27th, the University of Macau came to our lab to visit us. We established good connection by providing feedback and contact of authoritative expert of related studies. We further discussed technical problems including: 1) Knowledge on BioBirck scar usage; 2) Common protein expression condition; 3) Suggestion on how to complete the medal requirements.

Meet up with HKUST

On August 17th, we visited the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology iGEM team. We exchange opinions on each other’s’ projects. Later on we provided the mammalian dCas9 plasmid developed by our laboratory for HKUST to carry out mutagenesis to create dCas9 they needed so as to save its energy in the subsequent experiments.

Meet up with the University of Edinburgh

On August 2nd 2019, we met with the University of Edinburgh iGEM Team. We discussed what our projects are about and tried to find ways how we could potentially help out each other. I signposted their team for modelling – The University of Edinburgh recommended us to reach out to St. Andrews team for dynamic modelling advice and explained how constraint-based modelling works in case they’d find it useful. The University of Edinburgh also offered help in learning how to program in Python. Our team offered to do wet lab measurements for the University of Edinburgh in September.

One Day Synthetic Biologist

One Day Synthetic Biologist is a one-day event organized for local secondary school students to promote synthetic biology and our project, Banana Saviour. On 26th July 2019, 20 students from 7 local secondary schools were invited to our laboratory, where we conducted a laboratory tour as well as holding a mini talk on synthetic biology and the project.

As for the laboratory tour, we guided them in trying out polymerase chain reaction and DNA gel electrophoresis. We also introduced to them some basic safety guidelines when performing lab duties, such as the procedures in handling pipettes. Moreover, we have prepared an empty vector and a cloned gene for them to identify the difference in base pairs so as to introduce the concept of cloning. Furthermore, we have demonstrated miniprep, which is an important technique in molecular biotechnology. As these are the fundamentals to performing synthetic biological experiments, we hoped that by instructing these basic techniques to them would give them the basic idea about synthetic biology experiments.

From the survey we conducted by questionnaire at the end of the workshop, 89% of the participants have a better understanding of synthetic biology after the talks. While 42% of the interviewees are interested in joining competitions similar to iGEM in the future, 73% of the participants have a better understanding of BXW.

Second Greater Bay Area Synthetic Biology Conference

On August 13th – 16th 2019, the South China University of Technology and the Chinese University of Hong Kong invited synthetic biology researchers to gather in South China University of Technology, with the theme of "The Application of Synthetic Biology and Socialization". Experts including Professor ZHU Wei, Mr. Wang Guangyuan, Mr. GUO Xiaolong, Mr. Huang Dafu, Miss Ye Donglei, Mr. Yu Canghai from the biology field, education field and information field discussed the promotion of synthetic biology and the transition of technology to real-life application. During the forum, team presentation, poster sessions, guest talks and panel discussion were carried out. During this forum, we communicated with people from various fields on the socialization and commercialization of the project, and learned about different expectations and suggestions.

Hong Kong iGEM Symposium 2019

The Hong Kong iGEM Symposium 2019 was held in the Yasumoto International Academic Park, CUHK on 21 September 2019. The aim of this symposium was to create a platform for University iGEM teams and Secondary school iGEM teams to present their projects and receive feedback from each other. We wished to facilitate idea exchange between University teams and Secondary school teams. Hence, we could refine our project before the competition. We also hoped that through presentations and group interactions, participants can familiarize themselves with the standard iGEM presentation format so that all of us will have a good performance in the coming competition.