Team:Tianjin/Practices
Overview
As Peter Carr, the director of judging said, "Human Practices is the study of how your work affects the world, and how the world affects your work." To make synthetic biology accessible to public and address some questions "beyond the bench", relating to ethics, sustainability, safety, environmental impact and feasibility, we, Tianjin iGEM team, well planned a variety of human practice activities.
Educational & Public Engagement
By hosting Science & Education Exhibition in Open Day on our campus where over 30,000 people entered our campus and Showed their interest in our exhibition , we worked with people of all ages and education levels, from children to adults, to spark new scientific curiosity, to enhance their understanding of biology, specifically synthetic biology and to establish a public dialogue from voices outside the lab. Additionally, through holding such science lecture for students, making yearly social practice report, we did our utmost to make synthetic biology accessible to both students and teachers. (More details)
Recycling & Reusing PET
Primarily, we read quantities of journals to learn about overseas and domestic conditions of recycling and reusing PET. Meanwhile, in order to obtain information concerning the status quo of Chinese recycling of waste PET, we attended the 10th seminar on China’s plastics industry and interviewed project-related experts, thereby acquiring the experts’ concerning ethics, environmental impact and economic analysis of our project. What we did assists our team in exploring the prospect of the project.(More details)
Local Hospital Visit
We were decided to hear more stakeholders’ voice about our protein chip, and we hoped to learn about the current information about tumor detection means and obtain experts’ feasibility and risk assessment of our project through human practice activity. Thus, we went to General Hospital of Tianjin Medical University to get experts’ professional advice and investigate the needs of patients. (More details)
Talks & Media
We held panel discussions and attended various meetings and seminars in order to exchange ideas and refine our project. Meanwhile, we presented our project with more in-depth details to more than thirty Chinese iGEM teams in Central China iGEM Consortium. (More details) Besides, not only did we utilize online media involving Twitter, Wechat, Renren Blog and wiki to expand the influence of our activities and synthetic biology, but were involved to write Biweekly Newsletter, which can be regarded as a collection of information and introduction about most iGEM teams and a better access to exchange teams’ ideas conveniently. (More details)
Survey Questionnaire
In the process of building a new iGEM team, we discovered several problems in the development of iGEM in China. As a result, in order to investigate the current situation of iGEM at home and abroad, and find solutions for our team and more Chinese teams, we designed and carried out a survey questionnaire on university involvement in iGEM. More than one hundred iGEMers replied to assist us in gathering iGEMers’ perspectives and feelings. (More details)
Team Collaboration
In cooperation with other ten iGEM teams, we collected issues of each team and posted a questionnaire in order to understand different people’s views on project-related issues in different regions of the world and make publicity for synthetic biology. Also, our team members visited and communicated with some teams in depth such as Tsinghua-A and NKU. (More details)
Seek Sponsors
We contacted with more than one hundred companies, most of which are biotechnology companies. We introduced the iGEM and our project to them and showed our sponsorship proposal. When looking for sponsorship, we not only obtained the sponsor fees but made better promotion of iGEM and synthetic biology. With the opinions from the experts, we can better our project. Additionally, we also harvest a lot of 
experience and deepen our understanding of our project when going out of school and contacting workers and experts.(More details)
It is the second time for Ketong to take part in iGEM. And this year not many people would play jokes on him because he has become the team leader and usually shows his straight face. He doesn't like pretty loli anymore, but he still loves female.
Dongqi is another leader in our team. She is lazy in body but hardworking in mind. Larry in the book The Razor's Edge is her idol.
Jiashu is a gentle nice girl, and everyone is impressed with her warm smile. Meanwhile, she is often called Boss by Junjie Yu because she could conduct biological experiments perfectly.
Yang is a junior student majoring in Biology. He would show great earnest and passion when he is doing experiments. And he could do management very well.
When Chenmao joined our team, he was just a freshman, but he had got unique insights about GMO. Although his major is EE, he is no worse than us in doing biological research. Science fiction is always his dish.
Heng is an enthusiastic boy who comes from a beautiful coastal city. His favorite sport is badminton, and our instructor Yang often plays it with him. He believes life is movement.
Junjie Zong is a humorous and lively boy, crazy about sports and Japanese comics. He says he has an inexplicable crush on biological lab…(Do you?)
Yuwei has a very active and open characteristic, sometimes like a boy. However, when she does experiments, she could show great patience and carefulness. She loves others' praise, so everybody follow me and speak aloud- You are the apple of my eye.
Xuan is the only person praised by Shoujie as handsome. He is very keen on basketball and almost his every WeChat' moment is about it. In our team, he is Ketong's good partner in molecular cloning.
Yuchen describes himself as a talker, however, in our mind he is a singer, though I never get a chance to appreciate his singing. He is in charge of molecular cloning, at the same time he studies English hard every day. 2
Bowen is a graceful girl who is admired by us for her fluent and native English. In her spare time, she loves watching movies and reading books. Christopher Nolan and Scientific American are her favorites.
Junjie Yu is a junior student majoring in Chemical Engineering. He said why he joined us was that Ketong let him consider biological experiments interesting. Now he is in charge of the project of plastic degradation and could do molecular cloning very well.
Haofeng would love to talk with people, creating fun of dreary experiments. He loves racing with others on agarose gel electrophoresis experiments. In daily life, his hobby is basketball.
Jinxin once said his life was forever about losing something, looking for it and waiting for others to send it back. He is in charge of molecular cloning now, and he just lost some base pairs as sequencing showed…
As the only person who can paint and design, Qing is our team's treasure without doubt. Besides drawing, she is addicted to Japanese comic and games. Meanwhile, she is Lionel Andrés Messi's great fan.
Programmers should always be respected, so as Shubin for our wiki. He could analyze web pages and photos with particular professional insights. By the way, Tianjin's hot summer really drives him crazy.
Yige is a senior girl who is always curious about the unexplored world and enjoys life very much . She loves climbing mountain and diving, which make her close to nature. By the way, she is really addicted to Sichuan cuisine, Taiwan snacks and pizza.
Xuemei has very infectious laughters and always brings sunshine to others. She loves jogging and watching variety shows. She is in charge of human practices and the project about protein chip.
Xiangyu is a lovely sophomore boy who brings laughters to our daily work with his own humor. He takes charge of modeling on enzymatic dynamics of cutinases in our team. And he will show his fluent English in Jamboree presentation.
There is a sentence on Hua's desktop-keep calm and love mathematics. Naturally she is a member of our modeling group, and she is thought to be their boss. Her major is chemical engineering, but she dreams to study applied math in the future. Best wishes to her!
Zexiang is a senior student majoring in Biological Engineering. He is crazy about genetic engineering, playing basketball and ping-pong. He takes charge of modeling on assembly of hydrophobins and enjoys it very much.
Yifan maybe our most mysterious member because nobody has seen him except Ketong. He devotes to our wiki's programming, which is his hobby. Hoping he will show his talent here!
Wet lab:
Molecular cloning & Protein expression:
Ketong Shao, Jiashu Liu, Chenmao Wang, Yuwei Zhang, Junjie Yu, Yang Wang, Xuan Han, Yuchen Li, Haofeng Wang, Junjie Zong, Jinxin Hu, Qing Zhao, Dongqi Bao.
Super Protein Chip:
Heng Chi, Bowen Han, Xuemei Dong, Yuchen Li, Junjie Zong.
Stimulated Plastic Degradation:
Junjie Yu, Xuan Han, Jiashu Liu, Qing Zhao.
Protein Extraction Kit:
Chenmao Wang, Yuwei Zhang, Jinxin Hu, Yang Wang, Haofeng Wang.
Specially, Dongqi Bao and Ketong Shao didn't belong to a specific group, but they took part in and took charge of all of them.
Modeling:
Protein Extraction:
Hua Wang.
Adsorption:
Zexiang Chen.
Plastic Degradation:
Xiangyu Yin.
They also took part in wiki editing.
Human Practice:
Yige Peng, Xuemei Dong.
Wiki&Design:
Shubin Li, Qing Zhao, Yifan Zhang, Dongqi Bao.
Specially, Dongqi Bao took charge of modeling, human practice and wiki&design.
We would like to express our deepest gratitude towards every person and institute that has helped us.
Lab supports:
Our great thanks to Nankai University’s iGEM team for their selfless help on our protein HGF1 expression.
Our most sincere thanks to School of Life Sciences, Tianjin University. Our experimental space and materials are kindly provided by Haitao Yang and Zefang Wang’s lab.
We appreciate every piece of suggestion and help for our experiments from the following people: our instructors Haitao Yang and Zefang Wang, Dr. Cheng Chen, Deping Wang, Fei Wang, Xiaoyun Yang, Yusheng Tan, Wen Cui, Shengnan Liu, Qingbin Shang, Yuhan Zhang and Chen Wu.
Finally, we would like to thank greatly for Agnieszka Przylucka from Vienna University of Technology and Henrik Cordes from TU_Darmstadt 2012 who replied our e-mails on experiment design.
Idea and project suggestions:
Thanks to our instructor Zefang Wang who gave us much precious advice.
We are also grateful to Shoujie Sun from Tianjin 2013&2014.
Human Practice:
Fund supports:
Our project is mainly supported by School of Life Sciences and Tianjin University.
