Difference between revisions of "Team:CHINA CD UESTC/hp meetup"

Purpose:

Through the establishment of the University of Electronic Science and Technology iGEM club, we hope to achieve the following purposes:
1. Cooperate with the iGEM team to prepare the competition.
2. Offer a platform for the fresh students and junior students to get aware of iGEM.
3. The club is also a good place that create great idea about iGEM projects. 4. Establish the prototype of non-government (NGO) related to iGEM.

April 9th, the iGEM club of UESTC established in Shahe campus. We invited Mr. Dezhong Yao, Dean of School of Life Science and Technology, Lixia Tang, the instructor of CHINA_CD_UESTC, Fengbiao Guo, the instructor of software team.

The team leader of CHINA_CD_UESTC, Kaiyue Zhang introduced the iGEM and our team to the audiences. The leader of iGEM club, Huanhuan Wei said that the iGEM club will offer opportunities and the last information to the students who are interested in synthetic biology. There will be some interesting activities and interaction in this club. The members can start to prepare since the fresh year. They will know what to learn earlier and prepare well. The iGEM club will be a formal club like other clubs in our school. We will help it become our reserve forces.

Purpose:

Publicity: With the development of iGEM, there is an increasing number of schools taking part in iGEM. In China, most teams are from northeast region, therefore, we want to expand the influence of iGEM in southwest China. This year our team of UESTC founded the iGEM Southwest Union of China which was based on the colleges and universities in southwest region. We invited the teams that have taken part in or interested in iGEM as well as social organizations and enterprises related with biology to participate in our discussion.

Improvement: Universities and organizations of the union have their own strengths and characteristics. For example, social enterprises have different views, all the aspects of opinions are needed to be adopted. We expect each year in the future we can not only share and exchange different ideas about iGEM on communication live, but also exchange our projects online or in more forms, which will be a great help to future iGEM teams.

Details

This year our iGEM team spent a lot of energy on contacting with colleges and universities of southwest region, we successful got in touch with teams Taiwan's Chang Gung University and Sichuan University, as well as colleges expect to participate in iGEM next year, such as Sichuan Agricultural University and Southwest University for Nationalities, students from Chengdu Shude High School and Chengdu NO.7 High School Jia Xiang Foreign Language School who are interested in iGEM. In addition, we also invited several engineers and managers of the Chengdu Biological Maker. Finally we hold the iGEM communication and the Establishment of Southwest Union of China on July 25 at Qingshui river campus of UESTC.

Although the iGEM competition add the high school section since 2015. Chinese high school students have little enthusiasm to take part in iGEM. We consider it mainly from the pressure of China's College Entrance Examination, knowledge reserves, laboratory equipment, etc. But the most important reason is that they lack of a good understanding of iGEM and a more professional counseling. Therefore, we invited students from Chengdu Shude High School and Chengdu NO.7 High School Jia Xiang Foreign Language School who are interested in iGEM to attend our conference. During the conference, we introduced competition process to them in detail, and taught them some necessary experiment skills(High School Guide accessories). We hope that through this communication, high school students of the southwest can know about iGEM more comprehensive and arouse their enthusiasm to participate in iGEM.

In communication meeting, each universities actively shared their synthetic biology project and experience. Sichuan University introduced their project which is the technology of microbial nitrogen and carbon fixation. At the same time, they put forward their difficulty they are facing that they haven’t found a way to get the azotobacter. At the beginning of our project, we also spent a hard time on finding Magnetotactic Bacteria, so we suggest they can search relevant literatures to find research institutes’ email addresses and email them, or request school teachers to contact for help.

We showed our project of making a microbial fuel cell with Magnetotactic Escherichia coli. Our project aroused everyone’s attention and they were interested in the long gene cluster of Magnetotactic Bacteria. Software team of UESTC introduced minimal gene set prediction related software development from the perspective of bioinformatics. As the only software team among these teams, their project also attracted everyone’s interests.

Southwest University for Nationalities team was particularly interested in iGEM process and preparation conditions, because they were going to play their first game in the next year. Aiming at their most interesting topic, how to find a suitable project, we gave our suggestions. On the one hand, they can look for study angle based on research contents of school professional teachers. On the other hand, we expected that they can creating their project by combining their daily life experiments and literatures they read.

Sichuan Agricultural University team is also preparing to take part in iGEM next year; apparently they have some basic knowledge about iGEM. However, their biggest problem is the team sponsorship. For this problem, Biological Maker said that they would like to make further discussion with Sichuan Agricultural University students about the fund.

Representative of Biological Maker introduced Biological Maker culture and biology related enterprises region's situation as well as expressed their good will to cooperate with university students. In the subsequent activity, we went to the Biological Maker Space for visit and study.

After the further free discussions in terms of technology and ideas of iGEM, instructor Fengbiao Guo issued the Southwest Union of China certificate to each organization representatives and took a group photo as a souvenir. This not only marked the establishment of iGEM Southwest Union of China, but also indicated members of the union will start a more long-term and stable cooperation with each other.