Team:SHSBNU China/Public Engagement

• Acknowledgement
• Team
  Team Members Our School Collaborations Attributions
• Judging
  Judging Achievements
• Model
  Modeling Software
• Safety
• Human Practices
  Intergrated Human Practices Public Engagement
• Parts
  Overview Basic parts Composite Part Collection Improve
• Lab
  Experiments Notebook Protocols
• Project
  Inspiration Description Design Results Hardware Demonstrate Prospect

Public Engagement

Synthetic Biology Club

Our Synthetic Biology Club of SHSBNU was founded in 2016. It teaches important molecular cloning experiments and advanced biology course to students who wanted to devote themselves in this field. With the teacher’s strong support and some veteran member’s help, the Synthetic Biology Club has provided a lot of resources for many students who is interested in biology.

This year, we modified the training of Synthetic Biology Club into two parts:
① Entry level course that teach principle of synthetic biology, lab practice in safety, bacterial inoculation, plasmid extraction, electrophoresis, construct simple genetic circuit with 1 promoter and GFP reporter gene.
② High level course that started with discussing synthetic biology literature, then carrying out student seminars discussing the content of literature. This encourage students to think and dig more deeply into real science research, and will eventually lead the way of our club members into the next years iGEM.

③ To further engage to the public and enhance the influence of our synthetic biology club in campus. This year, we’ve produced a set of tutoring videos for synthetic biology experiment. These videos were uploaded to our online teaching platform to attract more students to engage into synthetic biology.

For SHSBNU SCI-SHOW, we show documentary film in topic of synthetic biology and other biological science related to synthetic biology, the show is on every Wednesday, it helps students to have a better understanding of synthetic biology and lets students to have a comprehensive ability.

In the lab event of our Synthetic Biology Club, we found doing fluorescent measurement being a hard task. Despite the very expensive fluorescent measurement device, there are no available equipment to quantitatively measure the GFP fluorescent.
In order to expand the range of experiment we can carry out in our club, we developed a cheap GFP fluorescence measurement equipment (shown below). The cost of the equipment is less than $30.

Check more details here (in Secton Hardware)

After these attempts, we realized that synthetic biology not only involves the knowledge of biology, but also involves mathematics, physics, engineering, computer and a touch with the public society. Because of this, it can attract students from different disciplines to participate in it, and the team members of the same team will involve cooperation in different fields, which may be another harvest brought to us by iGEM - learn to cooperate.