Human Practice

Safety

We take biosafety as one of the most important consideration or both human and environment. To avoid personal injuries, and biochemical reagent leakage to the environment, our iGEM team has been given extensive biosafety trainings regarding. Every team member has received lab safety training by a senior team member or an instructor before they started in the lab. For example, our team members are strictly required to wear gloves and lab coats when they are doing experiments.

Our lab is divided into several areas designated for different functions. For example, one special area is designated only for DNA gel ethidium-bromide contamination to other areas.

It is essential for us to have knowledge for the organism used in our research. In our project, we use E. coil and Magnetospirillum magneticum (AMB-1) as our two expression systems. Both of these strains can be handled under the BSL-1 condition, implicating that environmental risk of working with them is low. Nevertheless, when we are working with these bacteria, we always strictly follow lab biosafety regulations. Besides, we avoid do not using highly harmful materials and device in our project.

Education

For students

In order to inspire the interest of small children and teenagers to science, we invited elementary school students to our college. We showed them around the lab and performed some fun and knowledge-oriented experiments together. They were fascinated by these scientific “tricks”.

Fig.1 One of our team member is doing the experiment “the magical yeast” with elementary students.

Fig.2 Answering questions after an experiment

On September 10th, 2016, we presented an overview of synthetic biology and the concept of protein purification to some freshmen

Fig.3 Presentation of our project

For the public

We have delivered 800 handouts to the public to engage in the science education. During the process, we introduced some basic biology knowledge related to our life, such as how vaccine are produced and how protein supplements can help people to build up muscles. Reading the feedbacks from the public, we realized that popularization of science is indeed necessary.

Fig.4 Handbooks

Fig.5 Publicity

Questionnaire

Protein purification is important to both biopharmaceutical production and scientific research. Producing recombinant proteins with high purity is essential for protein drug-based therapies, protein structural analyses and functional studies. However, most current methods require special devices or contain very tedious processes. So we asked ourselves: can we find an easy and handy approach for protein purification? From September 15th to 20th, 2016, we did an online survey among 671 individuals with a biological background and different ages to identify whether our idea is worthy to pursue.

Our survey consisted of questions for public opinions about current protein purification methods and problems they have encountered during in their experiments. The answers to these questions that greatly impacted our project are shown below.

Education level and the attitude towards synthetic biology

Education level

How much do you know about synthetic biology?

Do you think synthetic biology can be used to purify protein?

This survey indicated that the individual meet our requirement, and 83% are familiar with synthetic biology, 74% hold the view that synthetic biology is helpful to solve problems of protein purification.

What method do you use to purify recombinant proteins?

We would like to know what is the most common method in protein purification. We found that His-tag is mostly frequently used by scientific researchers.

What are the shortcomings of the method you use?

According to statistical data, 43% complained for its low-specificity. We used these comments to assess customer’s demand and improve our product in the future.

Are you willing to try a new kit that can simplify procedures?

Ninety-two percent claimed that they looked forward to using a new kit than can resolve the problem encountered in protein purification. It convinced us that developing a handy and reliable approach is indeed necessary. The survey did have a great impact on the initiation of our project. The feedback informed us an urgent need of a new purification method and gave us faith to continue our project. We hope that our ideas can also inspire other teams with similar purposes in the future.

iGEMer

iGEMer plays an important role in the whole iGEM competition, so we held up “running iGEMer” and “Fighting iGEMer” activities. We aimed to focus on scientific researchers’ physical and mental health. Running iGEMer

Although iGEMers are very often occupied by their work, they think physical exercise is a very important part of their daily life. In order to encourage more people to join in our sport activities, we organized “Running iGEMer” and “Fighting iGEMer” programs. With more and more people join in our programs, we held a memorial-day event. In the event, faculties and students in our college went to our forestry center for hiking.

Fig.6 Running in the morning

Fig.7 The organization of hiking

Fig.8 Our commemorative bracelets and commemorative medallion

Many iGEMers walked outside lab and joined the activity and we enjoyed the incredible moment together every morning. Fighting iGEMer

To provide a relaxing and comfortable working environment for our team members, we invited professionals from Mental Health Education Center in our university to help us with knowledge regarding how to promote our team work and emotion management. After these mental health trainings, iGEMers declared that their working efficiency had increased and it became easier for them to be involved in group activities and to handle depressed mood.

Fig.9 Team members are having sand table class

Fig.10 According to the sand table made by us, the counselor is teaching us how to have a better teamwork and manage our emotions.

Fig.11 We are summarizing how to control emotion and manage a team.

We also gave a lecture to the freshmen in our college about emotional management in our life and improving their abilities of teamwork. We hoped that we could help them to overcome difficulties and fit in with their teams.

Besides, we set up a public mail address for people who want to seek for help, just like a recycle bin for upset and negative mood. They can write anything that bothers them, such as experiment failure and quarrel with a teammate. We will reply to all the questions and comfort them as soon as possible.

Community

From September 2nd to 4th, our team was invited by Sun Yat-Sen University to attend an iGEM Summit held by the CCiC (Conference of China iGEMer Committee). All 28 teams invited to the Summit gave presentations about their projects that were commented and questioned by scientist reviewers. Our team prepared our poster and presented our project to the other teams . The meet-up truly promoted communications among iGEMers in China. Here we express our sincere thanks to them!

Team:NEFU China/Human Practices