Difference between revisions of "Team:Hong Kong-CUHK/Practices"

3. Facebook page

IGEM 2015 CUHK Team

We have also created a Facebook page of our team in order to post latest news from our team, like videos, photos, et cetera. This is to attract people to pay more attention on our team and the iGEM competition. Through posting photos and comments, it helps to bring this competition closer to people. Because the more chance they are exposed to it, the less strange they feel towards this technology and it assists on bringing a friendly image of synthetic biology. The eye-catching icon on our Facebook page was designed by one of our team members, which integrates our project with the iGEM 2015.

4. Workshop

As our target group is the younger generation, we have invited secondary school students to attend a one-day workshop held by our iGEM team on the 4th of July. This workshop was called “A day as a scientist in CUHK”, targeting students of F.4-F.6 from various Hong Kong secondary schools. This workshop aims to benefit high school students by providing a platform for learning synthetic biology and a chance to work in a lab at university. Firstly, introduction and ice-breaking session were held in the morning. Secondly, the first lab session was provided for the students to experience the lab work like pipetting, making agarose gel, dye loading as well as performing gel electrophoresis.

6. Promotion to freshmen

On our university’s - CUHK registration day on the 9th of August, which is when freshmen registered for orientation camps and attend to information talks. Our team members grasped the chance to introduce synthetic biology and our project to them and many other senior students. We were glad to have passed our enthusiasm towards iGEM to them, as many of the students we’ve reached showed much passion towards joining the team next year. As most of whom have only heard of synthetic biology for the first time, they were eager to find out more and excited about this competition. During the process, we have received many surprised comments, as most people felt so amazed that they could also have the chance to participate in such a competition and contribute to the development of synthetic biology.

7. Asia conference at Taiwan

National Chiao Tung University had held an Asia conference at Taiwan during 19-22, July, in which they have invited all the iGEM teams in Asia. Our team was honored to participate in this conference. We had a poster session to introduce the details of our project to other teams. Meanwhile, we also got this chance to listen to the presentation from the other teams and gained many great ideas from them.

8. Exchange of ideas with other Asian team leaders

Our team leader also got a great chance to interact and exchange ideas with other teams on the lab method and the promotion of synthetic biology. This was a precious opportunity which we can know the progress of other teams and their methods in doing lab. We also received some great suggestion which we consider seriously in order to improve our project. Through these interactive sessions, friendships were developed among us, and one of the other team's team leader even travelled all the way to Hong Kong to visit our lab.

9. International questionnaire

CUHK was honoured to be in cooperation with 10 various different universities to conduct an international questionnaire on synthetic biology and on our respective projects. The universities which participated were Technische Universität Berlin, Beijing Institute of Technology, Universidade de São Paulo, Chang Gung University, University of Leicester, Université de Toulouse, Tianjin University, Kungliga Tekniska högskolan, Karolinska Institutet and University College London. Responses were collected from the location where the universities are located. This helped to collect opinions from around the world, not only confined to Hong Kong. We can distinguish the importance and acceptance of our project in a much larger scale of different places worldwide.

10. City University presentation and exchange of ideas with their team members and professors

We have also had a chance to visit the City University of Hong Kong and communicated with their team members and professors. During the visit, we have reached an agreement on collaboration of which we would help them to do characterization on the expression of the lacY gene. And they offered to help us with part of the modeling of our project.

We have gained informative and constructive advice from this visit.

11. UCSF iGEM Team wikiflicks

To enable people worldwide to further understand synthetic biology and our project, we also collaborated with the UCSF iGEM Team, which composed of students from UC Berkeley, San Francisco State University, and recent graduates from Lincoln High School in San Francisco. Through this collaboration, we were able to present our videos on the UCSF iGEM Team’s wikiflicks. This enables us to spread the message to a much greater number of audiences.

12. Interview with Professor Douglas Yung

To better understand microbial fuel cells, which is one of the applications of our project. We had an interview with Prof. Douglas Yung. He is an assistant professor of the department of electronic engineering, CUHK. Prof. Yung acquired his Ph.D. in Bioengineering from Caltech in 2008 and worked in the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California as a NASA Postdoctoral Fellow focused on the sensor development microfluidics as well as bacterial spore viability. One of his current research interests is microbial fuel cell. Prof. Yung has provided us many valuable insights of microbial fuel cell and how to adapt this concept to real-life application. Microbial fuel cell is closely related to our project, it is one of the three applications of our project. We gained lots of knowledge from Prof. Yung on microbial fuel cell and asked for his advice on our project in which we regarded this as a valuable chance to review our project.