Difference between revisions of "Team:China Tongji/Outreach"

Human Practice

Collaboration

1. Human Practice

This year, our team mainly focus on communicating with other iGEM teams and raising public awareness towards synthetic biology. Through our practice, we have learned more from each other and built sincere friendship among our team and other teams. Moreover, we promoted the public’s understanding of iGEM and our project.

1.1 Three Teams Communication Meeting 1 -- 2015.4.19

On April 19th, we went to Shanghai Jiaotong University to have a communication meeting .Three teams including SJTU-BioX-Shanghai,NJAU_China and Tongji have attended. In this meeting, we first introduced our project respectively. Then we raised some question and gave some advice on other teams projects. We not only considered these suggestions and perfected our projects but made friends with each other as well.

1.2 Three Teams Communication Meeting 2 -- 2015.6.8

On Jun 8th we had a meet-up with NYU Shanghai, SJTU and a behalf from ITB, at NYU Shanghai. This culture-mixed gathering covered not only those topics on our projects, but exchanging of our daily experiences as well. After this happy meeting, we had a general understanding about each other’s idea and set up a long-term union for mutual assistance.

1.3 Popularize Scientific Knowledge about Synthetic Biology -- 2015.6.22

On June 22nd,we had a class in Tongji primary school.

Firstly, we introduced iGEM and synthetic biology to them. Then, we briefly explained our project. We had adapted our project for a interesting story. So in this class, we showed them this story by PPT and our explanation. They were very interested about C.elegans and asked many questions about it.

After this class, these kids had more knowledge about synthetic biology and iGEM. We achieved our goal that popularizing scientific knowledge.

1.4 Communication Meeting with SYSU-China -- 2015.7.11

On July 11st, we communicated with the captain of SYSU-China. We exchanged some problems and difficulties that we met in our experimental process. This led us to make a summing up of the experience and lessons.

We showed our logo and gave some advice to each other. What’s more, we talked about the construction of our wikis.

1.5 Exhibition at Shanghai Technology Museum -- 2015.8.8

On Aug 8th, with 6 other iGEM teams, we made an exhibition at Shanghai Technology Museum. We introduced our project and the iGEM competition to the people who visited the museum that day. More than 5000 people have seen our project, what’s more, we had a good communication with other teams about our projects!

Teams include: NYU-Shanghai, Tongji, FDU, SJTU, SJTU-software, XJTLU, ZJU.

2. Collaboration

Since its inception more than a decade ago, synthetic biology has undergone considerable development and has attained significant achievements with the help of the engineering slant. However, there are still obstacles to build a cell. Engineers try to abstract the DNA sequences into some standard functional parts and assemble them using some principles in electrical engineering. So far, the limited understanding of biological system prevents us to combine parts and modules to create larger scale systems. The complexity of synthetic systems didn’t increase rapidly as the Moore’s law (Purnick and Weiss, 2009).

Cells sense the environment, process information, and make response to stimuli. To make cells work well in complex natural environments, lots of processes have to be preset to react to various signals. However, when well-characterized modules are combined to construct higher order systems, unpredictable behaviors often occur because of the interplay between modules. Another significant problem is that complex integrated systems composed of numerous parts may cause cell overload.

Figure 2. China_Tongji_iGEM_logo

Our design approach may lead to a revolutionary step towards system integration in synthetic biology. Potential fields of application include organism development, living therapeutics and environment improvement.