Team:Tsinghua-A/HP/Gold
Interdiscipline Studies are Cool and Fun!
Our project is about information flowing through gene-regulatory networks and it contains both theory of information and biology. The human practice we did fit our project very well. We show the students who have no idea about what synthetic biology is the fun it have and also make the cross subjects knew by more people. We all think we have did a meaningful practice and help promote development of the cross subjects which is also the aim of iGEM. In a word, human practice gives us a chance to tell more people about our idea and the makes more people realize the charm of synthetic biology.
In addition, we discussed the crucial issue of multidisciplinary researches with our audiance in our lecture. We have integrated the theme into our project perfectly. We incorporated ideas of information theory into biological research. Mathematical modeling plays an important role in our program as well. We are not only adcocators of intersections between different subjects, but also active practipants in action.
We are a special team. Of the 13 members, 11 are from the Department of Automation, the rest two from School of Life Sciences. This background enables us to think differntly and to concentrate on subjects traditional biologists do not concern about. Early in our project, one of our members tried to model the dynamics of the cell with electrical circuit simulation tools, which are handy and provided interesting outcomes.
Interdiscipline studies are cool and fun! We tell the world, not only by showing the possibily to listeners, but also by exploring the possibilities ourselves. Come and join us.
Eliminate Chinese’s prejudice about biotechnology
After hearing the community's concern about biotechnology, we held two lectures to clear their prejudice. Meanwhile, we printed 200 booklets to expand publicity.
Background
In China, because of the UN human issue that scientists used 60 children to examine their new transgenic product, Golden rice last year, the question about the safety of transgenic technology remains indistinct. The masses even became scared of the transgenic technology as well as the total biotechnology. As a result, transgenic products were resisted all over China.
Lectures
Although many biologists came out to prove their justice, many Chinese still have stereotypes of biotechnology. We hosted two lectures about the correctness of biotechnology for college freshmen and high school students. We introduced the current stereotype phenomenon, then presented the biological applications that have made great contributions, such as bio-fuel, Artemisinin (kind of drug for malaria, first extracted by Chinese pharmacist Youyou Tu) produced by yeast and microorganism which can curb environmental pollution. Because our project involve the knowledge of both biological process and the lecture also involved the development of Synthetic Biology, which is a course of cross-disciplines, requiring us to look at a living organism from the perspective of information system. These contents attracted the attention of students from College of Information.
Discussion Session
After the lecture, we held an discussion session in which we freely talked about multidiscipline studies with our audiance. Biology is full of amazing questions, ones that can be seen from other perspectives, with tools of other subjects. These approaches can often sparkle new ideas and discoveries.
We introduced our own project, and demonstrated how mathematics help us investigate the system of living things. Probablity theory, information theory, ect. all make our project different. They asked us questions about the rationale of our design, showing great interest. One freshmen from Department of Automation later told us that she had never heard of such amazing things before, and that we opend up a whole new door for her.
Brochures
To circulate synthetic biology knowledge and inspiration, we demonstrated key ideas in the discipline in a booklet and handed out the booklets to more high school students. Two students e-mailed us to express their interest in synthetic biology and consulted to us about how to be admitted by Tsinghua University.
What deserves to be mentioned is that most participants of our human practice is from College of Information Technology and we had a wonderful communication through the human practice. They asked us many questions and we also got some inspirations from them. What impressed us most is that a student from department of computer told us that the circuit switching and packet switching in computer network when transmitting information. We got a great inspiration from his words after we asked him for details about the two terms. Then we thought that circuit switching is that transmitting all information through a certain line but the packet switching is that dividing the information into pieces and transmitting different pieces through different lines. Both of the two methods have merits and demerits. Then we thought that why we could not combine both of them and then we designed our experiments that transmitting all information through two certain lines respectively in order to reduce the noises and uncertainty. And the experiments confirmed our views in some degree.
So you can see that we had a very successful human practice and we applied what we got from human practice into our experiments successfully. It helped with our project greatly and met the requirement of gold medal undoubtedly.
