Team:OUC-China/Public Engagement
1. Comic book : E.coli Spaceship can fly far away
We believe that innovative educational tools have the ability to give children an insight into synthetic biology and enlighten the thinking of scientific exploration of them. This year, OUC-China continued to draw a comic book named and tried to spread them further. We added three new chapters to the existing comic book and put our comic book collaboration request on the website. More foreign teams are willing to help us diversify the language of the comic book, and we are very honored that they are willing to use our comic book to promote the science of synthetic biology. We are proud to say that our E.coli Spaceship can fly far away!
You can learn more about comic-book-based feedback on our Collaborationpage.
Click Chapter 4,5 to get more information about our comic books!
Click Chapter 6 to get more information about our comic books!
It worth mentioning that during the process of science education, many children love our comic book very much. Many iGEMers thought it’s a great science education textbook. In the future, we hope more iGEM teams will join us and popularize synthetic biology, making synthetic biology a household word rather than an obscure concept.
Figure 1: Foreign iGEM teams popularized synthetic biology in their country using our comic book.
Figure 2: We get many good feedback on our comic book from other iGEM teams.
2. VR: Experience the scientific life of biological lab
How to establish an effective public dialogue about synthetic biology? How to narrow the gap between synthetic biology and the public? The best approach is to allow the public to experience scientific life in an immersive way. Soon, an inspiration came into our mind, With reference to the results of the questionnaire and use VR technology, a great synthetic biology laboratory was built in order to put more people in touch with laboratory. It’s a golden opportunity for amateurish people to come in the biological lab. We have carried on the sharing and the propaganda in the school, has obtained the extremely high praise! We have carried on the sharing and the propaganda in the school, has obtained the extremely high praise! We look forward to sharing with you on site this collection of many of our passion and wisdom of VR creation! And expect some feedback. We also recorded a video about VR and it will tell you something about our great idea!
In addition, considering the availability and portability of the equipment, we have also created a mini lab to make it easier to share lab life with the public. We look forward to anyone who is interested in microbiology and molecular experiments to join us! We shared our microlab with the iGEM team and they gave us great advice and feedback!
Figure 3: The lab scene diagram we constructed
Some undergraduates were invited to experience our VR product and made some advice. According to their feedback, we will continue to improve our VR.
Figure 4: Other iGEM teams are experimenting with our Mini-lab, which they say is a great gaming experience!
Click here, and you can see our Mini-lab!
3. Summer Camp
We held a summer camp and recruited students from different schools in China. Before summer camp, we prepared a detailed schedule, safety precautions, uniforms and presentations for these campers. These lectures involve synthetic biology and iGEM, metabolic engineering and synthetic biology, PCR technology and cytometry introduction, literature search ability training and so on. During that time, they were taught 4 experimental operations in our lab, such as DNA extraction, PCR experiments, marine microbial separation and observation, butterfly specimen making. Furthermore, we made a summer camp book for them.
As the organizer of this life science summer camp, we invite students from Shandong University to join in the preparation of summer camp. Students from different cities took part in our summer camp. Not only have they learnt a lot of knowledge about synthetic biology, but they also could make full advantages of their strengths, found their personal interests and improved their learning methods. We have organized the whole process and benefited a lot!
At the end of the activity, the campers expressed their thanks to us. In this activity, they not only learned a lot, but also made good friends. On the one hand, they broadened their horizons and learned theoretical knowledge, on the other hand, they experienced the operation of molecular experiments for the first time. “So cool!” They were surprised when they saw the DNA belt they extracted.
Figure 5: We organized a summer camp to spread the values of iGEM.
We hope more universities can join us to make this summer camp more colorful. We also look forward to training campers to think and solve problems independently rather than guided by us at most time. This will be a challenging and meaningful job for us.
4. Hold two lectures on synthetic biology
After arousing high school students’ interest in synthetic biology, we turn to college students, hoping that more undergraduates can go into the world of synthetic biology and carry it forward. It’s obvious that the interest in synthetic biology expressed by the general public is primarily driven by the outcome. So we held two lectures about the practical application about synthetic biology and successfully raised their awareness for the variety of impressive iGEM projects. By these lectures, many undergraduates are interested in the synthetic biology field.
Figure 6: We hold a lectures on synthetic biology
5. RiboFold: A game to make people easier understand our project
As we know, the mechanism of biological and chemical reaction in microorganisms is difficult to understand for most amateurish people. So we need to find a simple and understandable way to solve this problem. In order to let more people understand the principles of biology in an interesting and effective way, we are creating a game-"RiboFold". The game aims to allow users to build more riboswitches by adding sequence of expression platform while keeping the structure of the riboswitch intact.It will offer you the aptamer region of riboswitch and four buttons which respectively represent four bases. By continuously clicking the buttons, users can add the bases and complemented the expression platform of riboswitch. At the same time, the changed structure of riboswitch will appear on the screen. It is expected that our game will offers the users an opportunity to randomly change the structure of riboswitch and construct more riboswitches. They can understand that the structure of riboswitch is so fragile that can easily influenced by the its sequence. We will continue to improve it in order to achieve the best presentation effect!
In the future, we want to further optimize our game to get more people involved in it and build a large riboswitch library. In this way, we can achieve the goals of propagandizing our project and synthetic biology.
6. The ideal synthetic biological lab: Communicate with other iGEMers
This summer, our team's labs were relocated and remodeled, so we need to think about how to design and arrange a new laboratory molecular biology lab. We have posted a cooperation invitation on the iGEM official website and look forward to receiving pictures and descriptions of the existing labs of the iGEM team, which will provide us with good ideas on how to design the lab. After careful and in-depth design of our laboratory, we began to think about what the future synthetic biology laboratory would look like and what improvements would be made on the basis of the existing ones. So we began to collect the ideal laboratory drawings from the smart and active iGEM team, and we look forward to them becoming “the greatest inspiration for humanity” and “ The future of synthetic biology laboratories" Many teams have participated in our collaborative projects, which inspired our ideas.
We have gathered all the good ideas we have received into reports, and hope that it will become a reality in the future! You can view our report here!
7. Support Education: Spread synthetic biology even further
We help volunteer groups promote synthetic biology and spread it even further!
In order to spread the concept of synthetic biology to children, we worked with the school's outstanding volunteer team, the dandelion, to provide them with interesting knowledge about synthetic biology, which the dandelion volunteer team Shared with children.We hope that what we have done will sow the seeds of a synthetic biology dream for our children.
8. Experimental manual
Invited by our teachers in Experiments Center, we edited an experimental manual including some basic microbiological operations and molecular operations. It is a great honor that our teacher wants to set up an experiment course with this experimental manual as the textbook, and we are very willing to share, to realize the inheritance of the iGEM.
For more details and get the PDF, see the Experimental manual.
9. WeChat platform
By reaching out to the communities, we found that numerous public misconceptions remained about synthetic biology. So we made good use of our WeChat public platform, a worldwide platform with billions of users for documentation, communication and popularization. We published some articles and helped them attach importance to synthetic biology and bio-safety. Fortunately, all these articles are rather approachable and most of them received positive feedbacks. We demonstrate here the articles and hope it may help more people enhance bio-safety awareness.
Figure 7: We published some articles and helped them attach importance to synthetic biology and bio-safety.
10. Software
This year, OUC-Chian proposed a principle to design modular riboswitch by introducing stabilizer and tuner. In practical production applications, when using riboswitch, synthetic biologists should select an appropriate tuner to regulate the expression of GOI, achieving their all kinds of goals. With the development and popularization of computer science, more and more scientific research works benefit from it，"Cloud-based" biology has become a necessity. To make it easier for biologists to design modular riboswitch with our principle, we developed a software. When user offer the original riboswitch, the natural gene , GOI and desired expression level, the complete sequence will come up in a short time. It turns out that our software can achieve the desired effect.
We've exposed the code in the wiki, and we're looking forward to helping future iGEM teams design the riboswitch and asRNA they need more easily and accurately.
For more details, see the Software page.
11. A syn-group: Inherit iGEM spirit
In order to promote the spread of synthetic biology in our campus, we formed a syn-group. These members gave presentations once a week according to their interests and interacted with others, improving their ability of reading papers and their understanding of synthetic biology. As their advisors, we do our best to help them and guide them. During one year, syn-groupers have learn synthetic biology, molecular biology, microbiology and lots of papers, which helped them improved a lot. It is really a good way to promote the spread and inheritance of synthetic biology in our schools.
More than 20 students from different majors join this group. They majored in mathematics, economics, biological science and so on. Because of their love for synthetic biology, students from different majors gather together. Interdisciplinary brings them better ideas.
During one year, they had mastered literature search ability, summary, teamwork, and communicate with others rather than a student who knows little knowledge of synthetic biology.
