Difference between revisions of "Team:Fudan-TSI/Public Engagement"

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<div id="demoCover"><img id="coverPic" src="https://static.igem.org/mediawiki/2019/8/84/T--Fudan-TSI--coverIntegratedHP.gif"></div>
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<li class="leftNavLi"><a class="leftNavA" href="#mainTitle1">Kids</a>
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<div class="row title1">Overview</div>
 
 
 
 
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During our human practices, we reached out to the possible users of our system and professors in various fields. By listening to their knowledge, we came to understand the needs of our users and make sure we stay in the ethical and safety line when doing research. We took experimental training and check thoroughly of a part’s nature and possible influences before using it. We ensured that our mutagenesis system would be safe to use while helpful.
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As an interdisciplinary branch of biology and engineering, synthetic biology has been widely used in many different areas and is relative to everyone. However, because of the enlarging gap between the public and synthetic biology, which is mainly caused by the public’s misconception and lack of knowledge on the subject, we find it hard to popularize, let alone getting more people involved in it. In this context, we think that iGEM presents to us a great opportunity to try our best to fill the gap and set up a bridge between the public and synthetic biology. To make our human practice work better targeted, we divided the audience into three groups: children, students, and general public. For children, we want to help them to realize the captivation of science and stimulate their interest in biology. For students, we focused on encouraging them to explore and participate in some real work in the field of synthetic biology. For the general public, we considered more about eliminating their misconceptions as well as inspiring them what can be achieved through synthetic biology to make the world a better place. So, to them, we mainly talked about the basic knowledge and concepts of synthetic biology research, and showed them some of the achievements across the years.
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<div class="col">Guidebook</div>
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At the beginning of our project, we found that we had no clue about how to start our Human Practice work. That’s how we realized that the conduct of previous teams is a valuable source of inspiration. Although the track they chose may be different, the goal of Human Practice has always been to reach out to more people and make a difference with your project. Thus, we compiled two guidebooks, one on Education and Public engagement, and one on Integrated Human Practice. We shared our guidebook with other teams and asked for their suggestions. In doing so, we hope to offer guidance to future teams on how to carry out Human Practice.  
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Here we present you our two Guidebooks. For Education and Public Engagement, we mainly focused on how to inspire public interest in synthetic biology targeting different groups of people.
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Even though the end user of our system would be researchers, we also hope to connect to the public and listen to the voices from a broader scale. With this hope we conducted human practices aiming towards general public and collected their feedback. Their opinions toward synthetic biology and directed evolution helped us understand more of what the public wants to see.
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<div class="row title2">Timeline</div>
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<div class="col">Kids– Biology is a fun thing to learn.</div>
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Our R-Evolution project aims to construct an in vivo continuous mutagenesis system which enables mutation generation with higher efficiency and lower cost. Our project will mainly be applicated inside the laboratory so it is of great importance to engage with researchers of relevant fields. In this way, we can better understand and appeal to their needs. Through our interviews, they also pointed out existing problems in our initial design, and offered valuable consultants on our experiments.  
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What can we do to get children involved in biology? To answer this question, we chose to work with Shanghai Jiuqian volunteer club, a voluntary association in our university devoting to providing long-term education support for migrant children. They showed a great interest in promoting biology. We cooperated with them in purpose of guiding children to excavate the fun of biology through motivating their creation and imagination.
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<b>Communication with volunteers from Shanghai Jiuqian volunteer club</b><br />
 
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On October 6th, members from our team and their association held a public class for children aged nine to fifteen together. To start with, we asked how they think of biology. We found that most of them understand biology as macro-level creatures like animal and plants. Then we introduced to them the basic knowledge of DNA structure and function, and showed them a DNA model which can be taken apart and reassembled. Afterwards, we invited them to build their own DNA model. One of the kids expressed to us that how amazing it is that such a small and simple molecule can play such an important role in maintaining and shaping our lives. We then gave a brief introduction of synthetic biology and held a discussion about what can be achieved by it. To our surprise, the perspectives they have about synthetic biology are so different and innovative that we were also inspired by them. One of them compared synthetic biology to a 3D printer which can create whatever you want by precise design and programming. They also proposed that synthetic biology can be very useful in medical field.
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Our team and Jiuqian association both felt that the workshop is a mutually beneficial activity, and decided to establish a long-term collaboration between us.  
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<div class="col">Prof. Hal Alper</div>
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<div class="col"><i>Professor of Chemical Engineering and engineering biology<br />University of Texas at Austin</i></div>
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<div class="col col-lg-7 eventIntro">Prof. Hal Alper developed novel synthetic biology and directed evolution approaches to increase the capacity of engineered cells. He has developed a similar in vivo continuous evolution (ICE) system in yeast using Ty1 transposon and an encoded reverse transcriptase. After we decided on our project, we contacted him through mail regarding problems on our experimental design. He affirmed to us the necessity of adding capsid protein to the system as it serves to increase reverse transcription efficiency. He also told us that poly-purine tract is needed for reverse transcription to take place, so we added the relevant sequences to our design.</div>
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<div class="col col-md-7">Dr. Zhong provided us with advice on improving our design by refining the details. In our project we designed a series of experiments to verify our system and insure its feasibility and efficiency. He pointed out to us that apart from the system’s overall function, we also need to set up experiments for the testification of each process in our system. It’s the accuracy and accomplishment of each step that ensured our system’s function.<br />
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Dr. Zhong also reminded us that the expression of reverse transcriptase (RT) might be affected in a heterologous host, and that the high expression of RT may cause misfolding and the formation of inclusion body. This led us to test which promoter is best suited for the expression of RT.  
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Our meeting with Ms. Zhang corrected one of our biggest misunderstandings with iGEM competition and the presentation of our project. Our initial belief was that the project could be separated into three different parts—experiment, modelling and human practice. We thought of carrying them out separately and then mix the results together at the end. She pointed out that this is totally incorrect, and emphasized to us that the ‘three’ parts are actually embedded with each other. They both offer each other guidance and refine themselves in this process. With this in mind, we chose to interact with our project’s end users, and refine it upon the receival of various suggestions.<br />
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In addition, she also reminded us that we’re doing human practice for a reason,every activity needs to have its meaning, that we’re not acting in order to fulfill the medal criteria, but to make our project better. We have designed our human practice work based on this principle.
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<div class="col">Students - Act now to create and innovate.</div>
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It is always easier for people to get involved and learn new things when are playing and enjoying themselves. When considering what can be done to stimulate students’ interest in synthetic biology and make it a fun thing to learn, we thought of board game. When we first set our sights on board games, we were impressed by its slogan: Everything is a board game. Numerous areas can be combined with board games including but not limited to education, careers and life. We regard it a perfect medium to introduce our system design and popularize synthetic biology among students.  
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<div class="col col-md-7">At the beginning of our project design, we were debating over which means should be used for system verification. One was to measure the expression of fluorescent protein, which should be recovered by the correct point mutation; the other was by utilizing antibiotic genes, successful recovery could be demonstrated by the growth of colonies. Both constructs have its advantages and disadvantages. During the interview with Dr. Lv, she pointed out that fluorescent detection would be less accurate and more laborious than colony growth, which is also easier to detect. She also mentioned that we could simulate the evolution of resistance genes or construct E. coli strains with attenuated or disabled endotoxin as future application.
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We encountered problems when co-transforming the plasmids carrying Cre and loxP-flanked mCherry respectively. We found that the fluorescent plasmid was undetectable even after PCR amplification. After our talk with our PI, we supposed it is the leakage of Cre that leads to the problem. Dr. Wang offered us various suggestions on how to enable a more stringent control of Cre expression, including using less strong promoter and overexpression of regulatory protein. <br />
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Initially, we were using same loxP sites not only in Cre activity tests, but also in our system design. Dr. Wang warned us that the splicing rate of Cre is much higher than its recombination rate. If we continue to use the same loxP sites on both ends, the DNA fragments are likely to self-splice instead of initiating recombination as we hoped. This is affirmed by Dr. Alper, who also mentioned that the multiple plasmids containing the loxP sites in the system could interact with each other. Two ideas were offered by Dr. Wang to solve this problem. One is using the mutated loxP site on one end of the DNA fragments and another is to use different recombinases such as Cre and Flp together. Adopting his suggestions, we changed one of the loxP sites into its mutated incompatible versions and tested their feasibility.
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<div class="col col-md-7">Prof. Lin mentioned to us that even if we controlled the expression of Cre, we could not be certain of the length of time it will stay in the cell. So, after we removed the inducer from the culture, Cre would likely continue to function, thus resulting in a mismatch between survived cell phenotype and unrelated genotype. Cre could recombine our desired sequence to the plasmid for one time and allow the cell to survive our selection, but recombine again afterwards and replace it with other versions when we’re scanning the plasmid. He suggested that we make efforts to address this problem, and this is how we came up with the addition of degradation tags to Cre.
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<div class="col col-md-7">When we were unable to model the whole reaction process of the reactions of R-Evolution, we contacted Prof. Qiang Huang for suggestions. He suggested us modularize the reactions and model the reaction process one by one, using the output of the previous model as the input of the next one. He thought it a reasonable way to approximate the real reaction, where different reactions mingle together. He also suggested that we could do some Monte Carlo simulation to acquire more information, such as the noise of the reactions. We readily adopted his advice and came up with the present models, from which we surprisedly found that the expression of Cre and reverse transcriptase should be differentiated which helped us a lot with our experiments.
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<div class="col col-md-7">As an expert in Adeno-associated virus (AAV), Ling showed great interest in our project and thought it promising. However, he also expressed his queries and suggestions. His main concern was the proportion of the native plasmids within the system after mutagenesis. In his opinion, it is an important indicator to evaluate the efficiency of our system. We tested this problem through modeling and found the optimal environment for the highest recombination rate to occur.
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<div class="col col-md-7">Upon our invitation, he visited our university in August and held a workshop with us. In the workshop, He gave us a lot of valuable advice as both a researcher and user of directed evolution. To start with, he pointed out that besides cheaper and less labor intensive, another big advantage of our system is that it can be adapted across various hosts. He also affirmed other problems that were mentioned before, including the leakage of Cre and the self-splicing of our mutated DNA fragments when using the same loxP. Besides, he held a lecture on synthetic biology in our school which was attended by many students including both undergraduates and graduates.
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To design a board game which can both be fun and educational, we held a brainstorm and came up with three prototypes. The first one is called Gene Expression War. Every player in this board game is an “E. coli”. Each E. coli will try its best to fully accomplish the travel of genome, and during this process it will utilize the function cards to express various proteins and gain the product cards to help itself to accelerate its journey or block other E. coli. The rules may seem easy to understand, but the overall design lack of scientific rigor and entertainment. We abandoned it after many unsuccessful revisions.
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Our second prototype is based on co-culture and expression competition. By randomly drawing cards, players will be able to put different parts on a basic plasmid vector, including improved promoters, origin and various functional genes. Under the limitation of culture medium and the bacteria burden, players will compete with each other. The one who can produce most proteins and energy is the winner. However, this version is so complicated that we are still working on it and we truly hope to finish it in the future.
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And here is our final prototype called Bio Mahjong Cards. It is succinct and quite easy to understand, based on a traditional board game in China: Mahjong. The goal of Mahjong is to collect special melds with different tiles, which is much like using different parts to construct a biological system. For detailed introduction, please visit our Boardgame Page.
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On June 1st, we delivered a lecture to high school students from Jiading No. 2 Middle School. As they are students of high school who already have some basic knowledge in different subjects such as mathematics, chemistry and biology, we believed that we should center our lecture around that synthetic biology is a new interdisciplinary area, and that it involves applying engineering principles to biology. Thus, not only students majoring in biology, but also others who are interested in relevant subjects such as engineering, are welcomed to participate in iGEM. Even if you’re from a less academic background, you could take part in it by conducting the work of human practices. By introducing iGEM to them, we hope to get them involved in next year’s competition.
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In the lecture, we introduced synthetic biology from the basic concepts to its forefront applications, hoping to present an overview of synthetic biology to our audience. We also shared with them some basic experimental skills and our experience in laboratory. We believed that this could both be of great help in bringing them closer to synthetic biology and revealing how it is actually like to work in a laboratory.
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At the beginning of our project, we found that we had no clue about how to start our Human Practice due to the lack of experience. That’s how we realized that is important to integrate the experience of the previous teams. Although different teams focus on different problems of various fields like therapeutics, diagnostics, environment and so on, the goal of Human Practice has always been to reach out to more people and make a difference with your project, thus we compiled a guidebook both of Education and Integrated Human Practice to provide some guidance for the further team on how to carry out Human Practice. As for Integrated Human Practice, we exerted ourselves to communicate with as more people as possible, from potential users of our project to professors and researchers who might help us enhance our project design, trying to fully interact with the outside world to extend the influence of our project and improved it. <br /><br />
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Here we present you our Guidebook for Integrated Human Practice focusing on following four questions:
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As for students from high schools who showed great enthusiasm in biology, we joined them in a Biology Summer Camp and held a seminar of synthetic biology on July 19th. Hosting over 300 students from 30 different high schools around China, the summer camp was a perfect approach for us to get access to students from wider areas. During the camp, we shared our experience of working on synthetic biology and iGEM with them. In order to give them a concrete idea of synthetic biology and our project, our team members shared their first-hand experiences in lab research and iGEM participation. After that, we gave a short presentation of our project, hoping to inspire them to come up with their own innovative ideas. Moreover, we had a more thorough conversation with students who showed specific interest in synthetic biology after the presentation. To our surprise, they brought up some creative ideas and new interpretations of our project.
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We also held a workshop with students from BIOS (Biology Intensive Orientation Summer) summer course. BIOS is a course for students with high interest in biological research and aims to cultivate their lab skills.We believed that the students have already possessed the capability of starting their own work in synthetic biology. What they need is just an idea and some inspiration. On July 30th, our team hosted a workshop with students from BIOS to introduce iGEM and our project to them. We also invited them to join in next year's iGEM competition. In the workshop, we delivered a presentation to introduce of the summary and experimental details of our project, through which we hope to excite the formation of new ideas.
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On August 16th, we invited Prof. Hal Alper to deliver a lecture about his recent research. (We also had a brainstorm session with Prof. Alper, details can be found in our <a href="https://2019.igem.org/Team:Fudan-TSI/Integrated_Human_Practice">Integrated HP</a>.) Dozens of undergraduates from our university attended this lecture, hoping to learn more about synthetic biology as well as system biology. During the session, Prof. Alper talked about his work on bioengineering and directed evolution, which is very inspiring to us.
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Prof. Alper also held a Fireside with other biology-majored students. Fireside session is a tradition of Fudan University, during which the invited professor would share his research experience and answer students’ questions regarding life choice and research.
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We found through careful examination that this failure is due to problems with our plasmid construct, so we moved the RT to another tested plasmid, and through SDS-PAGE, verified its successful expression (Fig. 4).
  
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Before trying to popularize biology to general public, we carried out a questionnaire survey in order to have a preliminary understanding of the average level of biological knowledge among the general public. In the questionnaire, we first designed questions to collect some basic information of our respondents for further analysis. Then a few questions like ‘Have you ever heard of gene?’ were asked to evaluate the respondents’ level of basic biological knowledge. In the end, we asked some questions about synthetic biology and iGEM. Even though we know that the misconception between public and biological research has existed for a long time, the result showed that their current understanding of biology is even below our expectation. Over 97.85% respondents have heard of gene but most of them learned it from hot topics like GMF (genetically modified food). Only 50.77% are aware of synthetic biology. This indicates that there is still a long way to go for the promotion of synthetic biology and elimination of misunderstandings. The development of biology requires the understanding and acceptance of the public as the fertile soil for its growth, we hope that through our effort, we could contribute to this process.
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To start with, we designed a pamphlet of synthetic biology. Our first edition was distributed to student of different majors in our school. We collected their feedback to improve our pamphlet before we distributed to the general public to make it more attractive and easier to understand. Considering that our target audiences lack specialized knowledge, we tried to avoid using professional terms, and made our statement as concise and clear as possible. In order to promote understanding, we also added some examples about how synthetic biology enhanced our daily life in various aspects including food, medicine and fuel. We believed that by reading this pamphlet, people could learn some basic knowledge about synthetic biology in a short time. And we hope this could encourage the public to think further about biology and to get more involved in it.
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In parallel with popularizing synthetic biology, we also dedicated our effort to shortening the distance between the public and the scientific researchers. The most direct way is to reveal the daily work of the researchers to the public. PCR (Polymerase Chain Reaction) is a basic molecular biology technique and is widely used in biology laboratories. Thus, we chose the demonstration of PCR as a window to show the public how the daily work in laboratory is like. Collaborating with students majoring in journalism, we took two vlogs, one records the main steps of PCR while another is about BioArt and uploaded them to the internet platforms such as Bilibili. By 21st October, our video had been viewed more than 370 times. We hope that through the propagation of simple experiment procedures, the public would be amazed to see that such elaborate demonstrations and such important theories all originate from adding up such ‘simple’ experiments.
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Revision as of 23:57, 21 October 2019

As an interdisciplinary branch of biology and engineering, synthetic biology has been widely used in many different areas and is relative to everyone. However, because of the enlarging gap between the public and synthetic biology, which is mainly caused by the public’s misconception and lack of knowledge on the subject, we find it hard to popularize, let alone getting more people involved in it. In this context, we think that iGEM presents to us a great opportunity to try our best to fill the gap and set up a bridge between the public and synthetic biology. To make our human practice work better targeted, we divided the audience into three groups: children, students, and general public. For children, we want to help them to realize the captivation of science and stimulate their interest in biology. For students, we focused on encouraging them to explore and participate in some real work in the field of synthetic biology. For the general public, we considered more about eliminating their misconceptions as well as inspiring them what can be achieved through synthetic biology to make the world a better place. So, to them, we mainly talked about the basic knowledge and concepts of synthetic biology research, and showed them some of the achievements across the years.
Guidebook
At the beginning of our project, we found that we had no clue about how to start our Human Practice work. That’s how we realized that the conduct of previous teams is a valuable source of inspiration. Although the track they chose may be different, the goal of Human Practice has always been to reach out to more people and make a difference with your project. Thus, we compiled two guidebooks, one on Education and Public engagement, and one on Integrated Human Practice. We shared our guidebook with other teams and asked for their suggestions. In doing so, we hope to offer guidance to future teams on how to carry out Human Practice.
Here we present you our two Guidebooks. For Education and Public Engagement, we mainly focused on how to inspire public interest in synthetic biology targeting different groups of people.
Kids– Biology is a fun thing to learn.
What can we do to get children involved in biology? To answer this question, we chose to work with Shanghai Jiuqian volunteer club, a voluntary association in our university devoting to providing long-term education support for migrant children. They showed a great interest in promoting biology. We cooperated with them in purpose of guiding children to excavate the fun of biology through motivating their creation and imagination.
Communication with volunteers from Shanghai Jiuqian volunteer club
On October 6th, members from our team and their association held a public class for children aged nine to fifteen together. To start with, we asked how they think of biology. We found that most of them understand biology as macro-level creatures like animal and plants. Then we introduced to them the basic knowledge of DNA structure and function, and showed them a DNA model which can be taken apart and reassembled. Afterwards, we invited them to build their own DNA model. One of the kids expressed to us that how amazing it is that such a small and simple molecule can play such an important role in maintaining and shaping our lives. We then gave a brief introduction of synthetic biology and held a discussion about what can be achieved by it. To our surprise, the perspectives they have about synthetic biology are so different and innovative that we were also inspired by them. One of them compared synthetic biology to a 3D printer which can create whatever you want by precise design and programming. They also proposed that synthetic biology can be very useful in medical field.
Public class for kids
Our team and Jiuqian association both felt that the workshop is a mutually beneficial activity, and decided to establish a long-term collaboration between us.
Students - Act now to create and innovate.
Board game
It is always easier for people to get involved and learn new things when are playing and enjoying themselves. When considering what can be done to stimulate students’ interest in synthetic biology and make it a fun thing to learn, we thought of board game. When we first set our sights on board games, we were impressed by its slogan: Everything is a board game. Numerous areas can be combined with board games including but not limited to education, careers and life. We regard it a perfect medium to introduce our system design and popularize synthetic biology among students.
To design a board game which can both be fun and educational, we held a brainstorm and came up with three prototypes. The first one is called Gene Expression War. Every player in this board game is an “E. coli”. Each E. coli will try its best to fully accomplish the travel of genome, and during this process it will utilize the function cards to express various proteins and gain the product cards to help itself to accelerate its journey or block other E. coli. The rules may seem easy to understand, but the overall design lack of scientific rigor and entertainment. We abandoned it after many unsuccessful revisions.
Brainstorm
Our second prototype is based on co-culture and expression competition. By randomly drawing cards, players will be able to put different parts on a basic plasmid vector, including improved promoters, origin and various functional genes. Under the limitation of culture medium and the bacteria burden, players will compete with each other. The one who can produce most proteins and energy is the winner. However, this version is so complicated that we are still working on it and we truly hope to finish it in the future.
And here is our final prototype called Bio Mahjong Cards. It is succinct and quite easy to understand, based on a traditional board game in China: Mahjong. The goal of Mahjong is to collect special melds with different tiles, which is much like using different parts to construct a biological system. For detailed introduction, please visit our Boardgame Page.
Board game card
Board game card
Lectures and Workshop
On June 1st, we delivered a lecture to high school students from Jiading No. 2 Middle School. As they are students of high school who already have some basic knowledge in different subjects such as mathematics, chemistry and biology, we believed that we should center our lecture around that synthetic biology is a new interdisciplinary area, and that it involves applying engineering principles to biology. Thus, not only students majoring in biology, but also others who are interested in relevant subjects such as engineering, are welcomed to participate in iGEM. Even if you’re from a less academic background, you could take part in it by conducting the work of human practices. By introducing iGEM to them, we hope to get them involved in next year’s competition.
In the lecture, we introduced synthetic biology from the basic concepts to its forefront applications, hoping to present an overview of synthetic biology to our audience. We also shared with them some basic experimental skills and our experience in laboratory. We believed that this could both be of great help in bringing them closer to synthetic biology and revealing how it is actually like to work in a laboratory.
Lecture to high school students from Jiading No. 2 Middle School
As for students from high schools who showed great enthusiasm in biology, we joined them in a Biology Summer Camp and held a seminar of synthetic biology on July 19th. Hosting over 300 students from 30 different high schools around China, the summer camp was a perfect approach for us to get access to students from wider areas. During the camp, we shared our experience of working on synthetic biology and iGEM with them. In order to give them a concrete idea of synthetic biology and our project, our team members shared their first-hand experiences in lab research and iGEM participation. After that, we gave a short presentation of our project, hoping to inspire them to come up with their own innovative ideas. Moreover, we had a more thorough conversation with students who showed specific interest in synthetic biology after the presentation. To our surprise, they brought up some creative ideas and new interpretations of our project.
Seminar in Biology Summer Camp
We also held a workshop with students from BIOS (Biology Intensive Orientation Summer) summer course. BIOS is a course for students with high interest in biological research and aims to cultivate their lab skills.We believed that the students have already possessed the capability of starting their own work in synthetic biology. What they need is just an idea and some inspiration. On July 30th, our team hosted a workshop with students from BIOS to introduce iGEM and our project to them. We also invited them to join in next year's iGEM competition. In the workshop, we delivered a presentation to introduce of the summary and experimental details of our project, through which we hope to excite the formation of new ideas.
Workshop in BIOS
On August 16th, we invited Prof. Hal Alper to deliver a lecture about his recent research. (We also had a brainstorm session with Prof. Alper, details can be found in our Integrated HP.) Dozens of undergraduates from our university attended this lecture, hoping to learn more about synthetic biology as well as system biology. During the session, Prof. Alper talked about his work on bioengineering and directed evolution, which is very inspiring to us.
Lecture of Prof. Hal Alper
Prof. Alper also held a Fireside with other biology-majored students. Fireside session is a tradition of Fudan University, during which the invited professor would share his research experience and answer students’ questions regarding life choice and research.
Fireside with Prof. Alper
We found through careful examination that this failure is due to problems with our plasmid construct, so we moved the RT to another tested plasmid, and through SDS-PAGE, verified its successful expression (Fig. 4).
General public –Synthetic biology is easier and closer than you think.
Before trying to popularize biology to general public, we carried out a questionnaire survey in order to have a preliminary understanding of the average level of biological knowledge among the general public. In the questionnaire, we first designed questions to collect some basic information of our respondents for further analysis. Then a few questions like ‘Have you ever heard of gene?’ were asked to evaluate the respondents’ level of basic biological knowledge. In the end, we asked some questions about synthetic biology and iGEM. Even though we know that the misconception between public and biological research has existed for a long time, the result showed that their current understanding of biology is even below our expectation. Over 97.85% respondents have heard of gene but most of them learned it from hot topics like GMF (genetically modified food). Only 50.77% are aware of synthetic biology. This indicates that there is still a long way to go for the promotion of synthetic biology and elimination of misunderstandings. The development of biology requires the understanding and acceptance of the public as the fertile soil for its growth, we hope that through our effort, we could contribute to this process.
Result of the questionaries.
To start with, we designed a pamphlet of synthetic biology. Our first edition was distributed to student of different majors in our school. We collected their feedback to improve our pamphlet before we distributed to the general public to make it more attractive and easier to understand. Considering that our target audiences lack specialized knowledge, we tried to avoid using professional terms, and made our statement as concise and clear as possible. In order to promote understanding, we also added some examples about how synthetic biology enhanced our daily life in various aspects including food, medicine and fuel. We believed that by reading this pamphlet, people could learn some basic knowledge about synthetic biology in a short time. And we hope this could encourage the public to think further about biology and to get more involved in it.
Pamphlet of Synthetic Biology
In parallel with popularizing synthetic biology, we also dedicated our effort to shortening the distance between the public and the scientific researchers. The most direct way is to reveal the daily work of the researchers to the public. PCR (Polymerase Chain Reaction) is a basic molecular biology technique and is widely used in biology laboratories. Thus, we chose the demonstration of PCR as a window to show the public how the daily work in laboratory is like. Collaborating with students majoring in journalism, we took two vlogs, one records the main steps of PCR while another is about BioArt and uploaded them to the internet platforms such as Bilibili. By 21st October, our video had been viewed more than 370 times. We hope that through the propagation of simple experiment procedures, the public would be amazed to see that such elaborate demonstrations and such important theories all originate from adding up such ‘simple’ experiments.