Team:SZU-China/Meetups
Meetups
Most meetups were held in the later stages of iGEM competition, which makes it impossible for many teams to exchange ideas at the earlier stage. Hence, the SZU-China team holds iGEM Southern China Regional Meeting in May every year, providing a stage for every iGEMers from Southern China to communicate with each other during the meetup, where we hope each team can get inspiration and improvement of their projects.
Southern China Regional Meeting has been held two years at Shenzhen University since 2017. Every team that has attended this meetup all received many suggestions on their projects by presenting their projects and listening to other teams’ projects. Therefore, considering the positive impact it had on the participating teams in the previous two years, we decided to hold this meetup again helping more teams to dig out new ideas during the communication, and by doing which, we could also provide an opportunity for every team to seek cooperation and exchange ideas with other teams.
Before the Meetup, we have posted the information on this Southern China Regional Meeting online (Fig.1, Click here to see more).
Fig.1 The invitation of Southern China Regional Meeting on the Official Website
Then, we received many requests to participate in this Meetup from many iGEM teams around southern China. After counting the number of iGEM teams to attend this meetup, we prepared many delicate presents for each team.
Fig.2 Delicate Presents for Each Team
On May 5, 2019, we invited team SYSU-China, SMS-Shenzhen, SCUT-China A, SCUT-China B, SUSTech-Shenzhen, SYSU-Medicine, SZPT-China, Greatbay-SCIE, Greatbay-SZ, and Shenzhen-SFLS, to attend this Meetup.
Fig.3 Boxiang Wang was Questioning
Fig.4 SZU-China was Presenting.
Fig.5 We were visiting the Place where Mikania micrantha was Cultivated.
Besides, we also invited 2019 iGEM Asian Ambassador Dorothy, 2018 iGEM Asian Ambassador Rebekah and the director of the educational product of Bluepha Co.Ltd. Boxiang Wang as our special guests, and they all gave a lot of professional comments to each team on their projects.
Fig.6 iGEM Asian Ambassador Dorothy and Rebekah.
We had a deeper understanding of our project and found some shortcomings of our project through communicating with other teams after the Southern China Regional Meeting, and besides, we could see all the teams that have participated in this meetup were passionate about synthetic biology, and we were also glad to see that synthetic biology would have a brighter future.
Meanwhile, we also received a lot of questions and suggestions on our project during this meetup.
Whether the detergent, which helps siRNA better pass through the plant cells, would cause damage to M. micrantha or even other plants.
After this Meetup, we sprayed this detergent alone on M. micrantha and Arabidopsis thaliana, respectively. The result showed that this detergent has a teratogenic effect on plants, and then we gave up this kind of detergent as our auxiliary solution and built a collaboration with the Jiangnan-China team to find a better herbicide adjuvant.
However, we still had some shortcomings while organizing this meetup. For instant, we arranged nearly ten teams to finish all the project presentations just in one day, which made us feel exhausted at the end of the meetup. Next time, we shall invite more teams and extend the time to two days for the meetup.
Fig.7 The Photo of 2019 iGEM Southern China Regional Meeting.
On August 20, 2019, SZU-China was invited to Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology (SIAT) to participate in the 6th CCiC (The Sixth Conference of China iGEMer Community), where we also performed as volunteers (Fig.1).
Fig.8 SZU-China team’s volunteers.
CCiC is currently the largest regional iGEMer meeting activity in the world. It is a non-profit academic exchange meeting initiated by iGEM students in China. It aims to build a platform for mutual learning for Chinese iGEMers. In the past few sessions, SZU-China has gained a lot of experience and cooperation opportunities from CCiC. And this year our team also benefited a lot from CCiC.
During CCiC, we made use of the gap time of volunteer work to communicate with other iGEM teams. Besides, we arranged two members to stay at two different conference halls and assigned them to record the presentations each team gave, looking for the teams that have something in common with our project, so that we could corporate with them and have improvement together. After the CCiC, we finally build up the collaborations with the team OUC-CHINA, SYSU-CHINA, UESTC-China, SZPT-CHINA, Shenzhen-SFLS and Jiangnan-China.
After we presented our project, the judges pointed out that making the RNAi nanoparticles as the RNAi-based herbicide was costly and hard to be manufactured, which meant that the herbicide presented small development potential and narrow market prospect. Hence, we carefully analyzed the cost and developed our third-generation products to reduce our production costs and make our products can be better applied to the market (Click here to see more about the Iterations). Moreover, we met Dr. Yeqing Zong, who suggested us to use R-Body as the self-cracking mechanism.
After the CCiC, we knew many other iGEM teams and learnt a lot from them. On human practices, they presented many ways to combine our project with the society and propagate the synthetic biology spirit to the public, and according to which, we did…
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Volunteer activity: Fight GREEN for More Green
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Two forums on the iGEM competition and our project in Shenzhen foreign languages school and in Shenzhen Polytechnic.
(Click here to see more)
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Documentary
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Applet promotion: calling for more people to join the Clearance of M. micrantha Campaign
(Click here for more information)
Fig.9 CCiC Meetup
