Human Practice
Summer School for High School Students
In order to extensively propagandize iGEM project, we conducted several welfare activities for high school students. We carried out a public lecture in Shaoxing No.1 Middle School, Shaoxing, Zhejiang Province, the theme of which was about present research of life sciences and development of synthetic biology. We focused on analyzing of some well-designed projects, such as the Coilsweeper, which was presented by ETH_Zurich in 2014 iGEM Conference. Besides, we introduced a "summer course" for students in Zhixin High School, Guangzhou, Guangdong Province. Our activities were very successful as most of the students presented impressive insights to iGEM, some of whom showed their gratitude to our enthusiasm and decided to keep in touch with us in the future.
2015 iGEM Conference Hosted by National Chiao Tung University
NCTU-Formosa successfully operated a conference last year and this year they have done better! 2015 International Genetically Engineered Machine Conference was a great success and it is a great honor to be invited.
This year, SYSU_CHINA presented in NCTU conference. We are quite excited that our project, Micro-timer, for which we prepared a presentation and designed a poster, really attracted many attenders, which arose utmost praise and encouragement to us all. The host, meanwhile, also left us an impressive thought that they have changed E.coli into probes, which was a bold design that broadened our horizon.
NCTU conference also provided us with an opportunity to communicate with other schools and teams. Thanks to the conference, we've found some drawbacks in our project when we communicated with other teams, and now we've tried to get rid of them. Besides, we've successfully established cooperative relationships with ZJU, SJTU & THU respectively. NCTU conference is a great communication platform for iGEM teams in Asian-Pacific Region. We sincerely hope NCTU conference can attract more teams and be more influential.
Newsletter
We also participate in the newsletter project organized by Amoy_China. We were always keeping in touch with them and our contributions were published on three issues. The topic of each issue is different from each other, so they would make an arrangement in advance with us for our contribution to publish in the next issue. Through the newsletters, we shared the thoughts of how to build an iGEM team and introduced the team members, and most importantly, the detailed illustration of our project. Besides, the both teams shared thoughts about top events at that time and we gave some advices about topic selection. With our cooperation, the bond between both teams becomes stronger; we sincerely wish that the newsletter would be even better in the future!
SKLBC Meet Up
Our team members participated in the iGEM meet-up held by SKLBC-China on 19th,July. Students and teachers from SKLBC-GDSYZX, SYSU-software, SCUT, and SCUT-China also participated in this meet up. First was the ice breaking part, in which all the participants introduced themselves, bringing everybody much closer together. The second part was the presentations from each team. Those who listened were asked to write down their advice and questions and show it to the presented team. During this part we made a brief introduction of our track. Many showed great interest and appreciation to our project, many other appreciated our PPT, and some gave helpful advice. We also discussed many problems of the projects of SCUT with their team members, and talked about some mistakes from the biobricks. The third part was called the world cafe, in which all participants were divided into groups and were asked to discuss over iGEM issues( biosafety, the relationship of software and experiments, etc.). The meet up lasted for 3 hours, and the online discussion is still proceeding. The meet-up was very successful, as by sharing and discussing, not only have we gained better understanding of other teams' projects, but also deeper recognition of our own project.
Team Selection
This year, we received an invitation to attend SCUT's team selection competition. Prof. Huang attended the selection competition at 8th July. Professors from SCAU also presented. Finally, one team won the permission to attend 2015 iGEM competition held in Boston.
Biocamp
We also participated in the biocamp held by the student union and had our own tent. With posters and display boards, we introduced synthetic biology, IGEM competition and our project to passers-by in the campus. Besides, a small challenge was designed for them. We prepared several biobrick cards, if they can sort out a circuit that could function(a circuit with one promoter, at least one target gene, one terminator, and is in the right order), they will be rewarded. Actually, though most of the participants were not major in biology, they were really interested in synthetic biology and enjoyed our little game. What's more, a few freshmen and sophomores showed passion in joining us.
National Teenager High School Science Camp
In July 20, 2015, we were honored to give a lecture in National Teenager High School Science Camp as invited speaker, which was held in Sun Yat-sen University this year. National Teenager High School Science Camp aims to make full use of the resources of colleges and universities in China to activate and cultivate the science-related ability of teenagers. More than 10,000 students attended in the camp every year, with alternative holding schools. Since SYSU-CHINA is an iGEM team with rich experience, our lecture introduced the history, influence, and some great ideas of iGEM, and most importantly, we introduced some of the most amazing projects in previous years. The students present for the lecture showed huge interest to systematic biology and genetic engineering. Some of them asked very good questions and showed a friendly attitude to this frontier of science. Frankly speaking, we believe it is worthwhile to participate in such education activity and bring more people to the wonderful world of synthetic biology. This is a big success and we would like to continue such kind of human practice in the future.
Freshmen Work
Suicide gene is a plug-in for our system to construct the delayed suicide system. Two freshmen of our school were assigned in this task. They really did a nice job but due to the lacking of time and experiment, they couldn't get the final results in time before wiki freeze.
The structure of the device (BBa_K1641058[2]) as follows. With a pBAD promoter, the killing system can be induced by arabinose and the cells will be killed in the presence of yellow-orange light (540-585 nm). Their experiment contains four groups: two experimental groups which our devices are transformed into E.coli and two control groups with empty plasmids. At the same time, only one of the experimental groups and one of the control groups are added arabinose. After adding, groups were cultured overnight, and were placed under white light at the temperature of 37℃. Then we measured the OD700 once in an hour. We can expect that they could totally finish this task if time permitted.
Collaboration
Collaboration with ZJU
This year, we cooperated with Zhejiang University in microbial suicide regulation. The project of ZTU this year will use microbial toxins in termite control and prevention, though how to improve strain safety become a important subject. However, one important part of our project is delayed suicide of microorganisms, so, in the hope of improving safety of their experiments, we provide them a complete regulatory suicide circuit, along which we also provide the detailed data of promotor's inducing expression intensity.
Collaboration with SJTU
This year, SJTU_Software build a biobrick selection assist system based on empirical algorithm. This system can generalize the heat map of different splicing pattern, based on the history record of its splicing sequence in the database, and provide a experiential score to the user. Experiential score is a score that not associated to certain experiment, so a specific situation is needed, which means it grades the results under different experiment condition.
We cooperate with SJTU_Software on the project of experiment grading and result predicting. We would set up multiple parallel experiment groups in the construction and testing of inverted components. These groups are comparable between their designs and results, which would become one of the pivotal parts of our project, and the data extracted from which would meet SJTU_Software’s needs.
Through our cooperation, they can grade our experiment results, then the scores would be compared to our evaluation. To SJTU_Software, the comparison of our experiment results and the design of our plasmids' construction is a case which can directly evaluate their software. And it is also meaningful for us to evaluate the circuits with software, which would be beneficial to improve our future experiments.
Collaboration with THU
The collaboration between THU and SYSU-CHINA is based on the recombinases and light inducible promoter. THU intends to construct a bio-memory system based on recombinases, however, they have trouble in cloning genes of recombinases.
In the NCTU conference held in July, they shared their concerns with us and we were glad to give a hand. So afterwards, we provided them genes and dynamic analysis data of recombinases including Cre, Flpe, Scre, Vcre and Vika.
