Team:SCUT-China/Conference

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Seminar & Conference

This summer, our team has participated in two Meet-ups to have a seminar with other iGEM teams. We have been to Taiwan to talk with team Chang Gung University and NCTU-Formosa. We have also held a small Meet-up for south China iGEM teams and talked with undergraduate team SYSU-China, SYSU-Software and high school team SKLBC-China, SKLBC-GDSYZX and so on. Every seminar, we all aimed at one topic such as team building, connection the “Dry” and “Wet”. We have made great achievements and summary plenty of useful tips for new iGEM teams to learn and follow. Also，we attended the 6th China Cardiovascular Prevention and Rehabilitation Forum to interview some specialists about synthetic biology and our project.

(Talk with Team Chang Gung University )

A.Meet-up with iGEMers in Taiwan

Our team member Roderick paid a visit to Hsinchu in Taiwan in July 2015 for an academic exchange with iGEMers from NCTU. The agenda is about the talent education of NCTU-Formosa.

(Pose with Prof. Chen and Team NCTU-Formosa)

In the aspect of team building, we can learn much from the method practiced in NCTU-Formosa’s recruiting and selecting talents. Generally speaking, there are three steps in their team building.

1. 1.Every fall semester, Department of Biology offers the course “Introduction to Synthetic Biology”. Before the course is open to the students, the professors will inform them of the knowledge and the iGEM to draw attention of the students.
2. 2.At the beginning of the course, the class will be divided into many groups. The professors will teach the basic knowledge and practice of Synthetic Biology meanwhile the teaching assistants will teach the method of literatures searching and reading. During the course, the students will be required to read the former projects and present what they have learned.
3. 3.At the end of the semester, every group will be asked to do a final report and present it. The format is that every group should put forward their creative idea and primary plan. Afterwards, some best students will be selected according to their academic performance.

In the aspect of team training, we assume that the practical training should be very important for us to improve the practice of Molecular Biology. The detailed steps are listed below:

1. The best students will be re-arranged into a variety of groups. In the first round, every group will learn the theory of experiments about Molecular Biology. After the first round, every group will exchange the learning and training with any other group round by round.
2. In the second round, the students will be asked to practice a certain experiment and observe the results, which will enable them to fully know if they are good at the experiments.
3. In the third round, the official team members will choose the most creative final project which also embrace the strongest executive ability. After that, they will do the brainstorming for the package and fulfill the design of experiment. In the end, they will invite the professors to vote and decide whether the projects can be executed.

The more important is the Corporatization (team management idea) from the professor Chen Wenliang, which is of a great creativity. He considers iGEM team as a corporation. For example, the Experiment Group plays a role as the Research and Development Department and offer the technical backup for ideas, while the Human Practice Group work as the Marketing Department. They communicate with the stakeholders about our own project. During the promotion and communication, they can strengthen the cooperation with colleagues in the industry and social communities. Also, they can accumulate adequate and diversified feedbacks so that the Experiment Group can polish our products.

In a word, a well-developed system of talent education is the key to a great team and project. Firstly, the course will offer students the opportunity to learn. Secondly, the standard of performance evaluation will show the academic qualities of team members as objectively as possible. Additionally, the round-by-round experiment training will improve efficiency. What’s more, the team will improve the management by putting Corporatization into practice and lay a solid foundation for the project.

B.Meet-up with iGEMers in Guangzhou

We held and attended a small Meet-up for south China iGEM teams and talked with undergraduate team SYSU-China, SYSU-Software and high school team SKLBC-China and SKLBC-GDSYZX in 19th July, Guangzhou. The topic of this team seminar is the connection between the modeling work and laboratory work.

The modeling work is supposed to be implemented before the experiment to make a prediction and instruction for laboratory work, while sometimes the modeling work just follow the experiments. Not all the researches are suitable to make modeling, and many biological question cannot be predicted and it can be only examined by real experiments.

In conclusion, modeling can help to design and serve as a guideline to experiment, while the data gaining from experiment can verify the degree of accuracy of modeling.

C.The 6th China Cardiovascular Prevention and Rehabilitation Forum

We were honored to attend the great conference in cardiovascular field, which is held by the First Affiliated Hospital, Sun Yat-sen University in 24th July. It was a fantastic opportunity for us to promote our idea based on the concept of synthetic biology to a variety of attendants of doctors, researchers, druggist and specialists. We introduce many applications of synthetic biology in health and medicine, such as rapid detection of cancer, killing device of virus and bacterial, in order to make them understand how synthetic biology can affect the current medical treatment, which raised their considerable interests. We also presented our project to some cardiovascular specialists and ask them for suggestions to improve the project design. During the conference, we were lucky and excited to interview Professor Hu Dayi, a very famous doctor in cardiovascular field. He said to us that gene analysis can be a medical tendency in the future, and tens of years later it may become a regular item of physical examination. It can help us know more about our heath condition and can improve the development of precision medicine. He also mentioned that our project may become a prototype of gene therapy for cardiovascular treatment.

In addition, here are some points of view gained from other specialists:

• In the clinical trials, we clinical workers also expect some new development in the research of preclinical medicine such as gene therapy and synthetic biology method, so that we can have more therapies to help patients get rid of diseases.
• Cardiovascular prevention is a heated and essential point for research. Thus, it is worth thinking about a way to do early detection using the method of synthetic biology.