Team:BIT-China/Human Practices
Winter Camp
After the Giant Jamboree, team members of BIT-China cannot wait to share
their experience of participating in iGEM. With the coming of the
cold winter,
we came up with an idea to start a winter camp and light the fire.
All students in our school are welcomed.
We invited our instructor Prof. Chun Li to give a general introduction about
synthetic biology and iGEM competition, which inspired many students to know
more about the logic
design and skills required to start a project related to synthetic biology.
Based on their needs, we
arranged several courses
for someone maybe interested in:
(1) The history and development of synthetic biology (Chun Li)
(2) Literature searching and reading (Chenyi Li)
(3) Photoshop training (Mingming Cao)
(4) Academic writing and English presentation training (Hui Luo)
(5) Brainstorm introduction (Zeyan Li)
(6) System biology and mathematical model (Pengcheng Zhang)
After the course, we
got some feedback
from students. From preparation to implementation,
the whole winter camp lasted for two months.
Then,we
welcomed students who showed great passion
to iGEM to take part in the brainstorm activity.
Communication with COFCO
What we designed is a product that might be used in large-scale
fermentation, to get some suggestions for applying our project in industry production,
we visited COFCO Nutrition and Health Research Institute.
We invited our instructor Prof. Chun Li to give a general introduction about
synthetic biology and iGEM competition, which inspired many students to know
more about the logic
design and skills required to start a project related to synthetic biology.
We introduced our project to the staff, getting many useful feedback.
Their suggestions helped us view our project in a different way,
and lead us to think more about application and the practical problems.
For example, they talked about whether we can give a false signal to
indicate the plasmid lost and kill the bacteria. In this way, they can
reduce the cost of treatment by not using heat treatment. Besides,
they raised a question about the distribution of inhibitor proteins
as well as the plasmids. The random distribution may also lead to the
signal delay, which inspire
hot discussion among our team members. These considerations give us more possibility.
Since there is no antibiotics employed in our project,
the company’s manager affirmed our potential use in large-scale production.
What’s more, since our project has potential to be applied and has the obvious
advantage of no antibiotics employed, COFCO provided us with some financial help.
HP Union
In the Asia-Pacific conference, we greatly enlarged our horizons by sharing
ideas to other teams at the same time, we feel it’s not enough and it’s
necessary and urgent to establish a platform for teams’ interactive communication.
That’s the first beginning of our HP union.
The first step is to build a Wechat official account to communicate with other
teams and propagandize
to the public. This way,
we can investigate and get feedback from the public easily.
We lead the HP union and start the union with other five teams: BIT, CGU-Taiwan,
Jilin-China, Peking, TJU. So far, more teams up to 10 are members of the union.
And we had () user paying attention to the account.
We shared some articles about synthetic biology to the account referring to
issues about biological safety, ethics, iGEM competition and other general topics.
Besides, we plan to
provide new teams or the potential participated
teams with resources
including union members’ project introduction and team members’ personal
contact information attached with attribution.
This way, it can facilitate the communication among students.
Conferences
In August, 2016, BIT-China was invited to take part in the Asia-Pacific
conference held by team NCKU-Tainan. About 20 teams participated in the
conference, and all of them made splendid speeches to
present their own projects, from which we got to know plenty of exciting ideas.
We also presented our project, and received lots of feedback to improve our design.
As the first one to present, the Q and A section of our team were under
hot discussion. The questions raised refer to not only the project design,
but also extend to considerations about safety issues.
We also realized the importance of oral presentation from the questions.
In addition to this, we held and took part in several exchange
meetings with other four teams: Peking, Jilin-China, UCAS.
Through these exchange meetings, we got many useful suggestions
to shape our project step by step.
