Difference between revisions of "Team:Jilin China/Integrated Practices"

To improve the feasibility of our project and stimulate public interests in our work, we did the following human practices. First, we held meetings with experts in cancer-therapy research to get academic advices on our project. After finishing a sketch of our project plan, we made surveys among faculties in cancer research and attend a cancer summit in Changchun to get suggestions and comment about the feasibility and safety of our plan. Next, we discussed with some professors in law to understand better the potential biosafety issues of our project. All these work helped us make great improvement of our project. To help people understand more about cancer therapies and our project, we attended a HUST-Cheering meeting, did a TED presentation and were interviewed by some local TV programs, including the Jilin University Television. Furthermore, we made online games, established a public Wechat platform and a twitter account to get feedback from the general public on the internet. To stimulate the interests in science among high school students, we gave a seminar on synthetic biology and our project in a local high school.

Lecture: Chronic Inflammation and Tumor

Place: Computer Building A521 Auditorium

Professor Xu, got a bachelor's and master's degree from Jilin University in 1982 and 1985 respectively, and received a doctor's degree from the department of Computer Science at the university of Colorado in 1991. Now he is in the board of University of Georgia and a famous scholar in science and technology, the director of the center for systems biology research at the University of Georgia. In 2009 he was awarded as a "Changjiang Scholar", the chair professor at Jilin University. In 2012, he was recruited as a Jilin university professor in "one thousand plan". Professor Xu is a world-class expert in computational biologist, bioinformatics, cancer research and so on. He has made quite a few significant contributions in the field of bioinformatics, for example: (a) biological pathways and the calculation method of networks and model research (b) cancer of bioinformatics (c) comparative genome analysis (d) Protein structure prediction and modeling. The papers he published had more than 40 H-Index. He got the Distinguished Scholar of Georgia at 2003, and was selected as American Association for Advancement of Science Fellow.

In the lecture, professor Xu introduced their recent research progress. They investigated the transcriptomes of different tumor tissue and make big data analysis. They made two major discoveries. One is that all the tumors went through the process of chronic inflammation, but not all of the chronic inflammation can lead to cancer; and the other is that the basis of tumor proliferation is Fenton reaction.

Finally, professor Xu suggested some useful suggestions to prevent cancers:

First: Stay away from meat, red meat have higher iron content, which is the main force of Fenton reaction;

Second: Stay away from alcohol, especially the person who would show red face after drinking, the body is telling you not to drink;

Third: Male should make regular blood donation to help prevent accumulation of iron in the body; women don't have to bother before menopause.

On December 17, 2015, professor Zhe Li was invited to give a seminar at the 13, 14 Tang Class forum at the Life Sciences Building.

Professor Li got his bachelor degree from the department of genetics at Fudan University in 1992, went to the United States in 1995 and got his Ph. D. training at the laboratory of Nancy A. Speck, a world-class expert at the research field of blood and transcription factors. In 2003, he got his Ph. D. degree in molecular and cell biology at the Dartmouth College, school of medicine. During his Ph. D. training, he made a systematic study of hematopoietic differentiation, GATA 1 transcription factor and leukemia, and published many research articles at high-impact journals, such as Nature Genetics, Blood, Cancer Cell and Genes Dev. In 2009, he became an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and continued his research at the differentiation of hematopoietic system and the molecular mechanism of leukemia and cancer biology. He has established a variety of animal models, made outstanding contributions at the pathogenesis of cancer research and treatment, and he has received many national funds in the United States, so that his research has been well funded.

Professor Li introduced the current research trends of tumor prevention and treatment, made in-depth discussions for cancer stem cells, tumor biomarker, the relationships between the tumor and inflammation. In addition, professor Li also talked about his expectations for good students, which are “motivation”, “detail”, and “attitude”. Professor Li is an excellent scientist, and we would like to follow his path and make our contribution to the scientific research.

With the aim of helping people understand solid tumors and synthetic biology, we did a survey with related questions in August 2016.Among 179 people completing the questionnaire, about 79% of them were between 18~30 years old, and most of them have bachelor’s degrees. However, most of them knew almost nothing about solid tumors.

Besides, more than half of them knew nothing about the therapies to treat solid tumors and only 10% of them know something about novel therapies, such as immunotherapy or therapies with the assistance of modified microbes. To the potential application of synthetic biology in the treatment of solid tumors, people’s opinions were uncertain.

On June.19th, 2016, Jilin_China Team attended Changchun International forum of Oncobiology and Translational Medicine. We interviewed the experts in cancer biology about the current trends and newly developed methods of treating solid tumors. In addition, we also asked their advices on our project.

Professor Cheshi Chen from Kunming Institute Of Zoology, CAS, gave a lecture about the development of new animal models for breast cancers. He discussed four kinds of common animal models: spontaneous animal model, experimental animal model, implanted tumor model and PDX model. He also mentioned some alternative animal models of breast cancers in addition to these commonly used laboratory mice.

Assistant Professor Boyi Gan from the University of Texas MD discussed energy metabolism and sensing in cancer. We asked him some questions about current cancer therapies. He told us that although radiotherapy and chemotherapy have low targeting, these two therapies are still major treatments in clinic application. Some new methods, such as targeted therapy and immunization therapy, may demonstrate better targeting effects, but they still have many weaknesses. Targeted therapy is designed to treat patients with specific mutations, so the rates of mutation largely determine the efficacy of the treatment. Immunization therapy can educate patient’s own immune system to cure cancer, and it is now widely used in clinic. He suggested that our group should verify whether bifidobacterium could educate human immune system.

TEDxJLU Conference was held in Jilin University in October 19th, 2016. We found it is a good opportunity to let people know synthetic biology and iGEM, so we gave a very good talk for this conference.

Our team was the third one to give the talk and the team member, Tingtao Wu, took the responsibility. Firstly, he introduced synthetic biology by giving the examples of the synthesis of artemisnin and the work of Jeff, which used the method of synthetic biology to assist in curing cancer. Then, Luwei Huang briefly introduced the definition of synthetic biology and its advantages. Subsequently, some problems were discussed and many potential resolutions were proposed.

Secondly, Yuwei Huang started to introduce iGEM to the audience, which was also the most important part of this talk. He started with the history of iGEM and its recent development. Then, Mingjun Zhang introduceed the primary responsibillities of members who want to participate in the competition. After that, some main contributions that iGEM has made to the development of synthetic biology were also introduced, including the construction of RSBP and some novel ideas raised from the competition. In addition, some achievements that the previous teams made were also included in this part.

At last, this speech was concluded with the introduction of our own project. Since the time was limited, we just introduced the basic ideas and the important progresses of our project. We also illustrated some of our results from experiments, human practice and wiki.

The talk was a big success, since the audience showed great interests in synthetic biology and the treatment of solid tumors. It also promoted the public awareness of iGEM among universities in Northeast region of China.

Our iGEM project gets high attention and positive responses from all life sciences teachers and even directors of the Academic Affairs Division Office at Jilin University.

To support our project and spread the influence of iGEM, our Jilin University News Network interviewed our Jilin_China 2016 iGEM Team early in 2016. Through this educational TV exhibition, we shared our project idea as well as basic synthetic biology concepts with the public. We are informed that the interview about us reached a vast audience throughout the whole University.

WeChat and Twitter

Though social network platforms, such as Wechat and Twitter, we shared our experience and enthusiasm with others. By recording the on-going events, we shared our failure or success and everybody could look at our growth. Sometimes we posted our lab-notes and our efforts in laboratory can be seen by our fans. We also promoted external communication, interacted with other iGEM Groups. Most importantly, we used these platforms for educational purposes. With our fan page, people who are interested in our project and the iGEM competition can follow us all the time. By doing that, they can learn basic information of synthetic biology, and get further knowledge in frontiers of this field.

Our fans give us support and encouragement, and they make our promotions no end at all. When operating these platforms, we saw a lot of support or accompany from our fans. Each response is the hopes, and they make us to know that there is always a group behind us. We are just a small group, but with our efforts, we are confident to take a try and solve social problems. A refueling let us have motivation to continue efforts. The Internet will help the knowledge and our enthusiasm cross all the boundaries.

We always care about the young generation, and we hope our project will have a positive influence on high school students. Therefore, we introduced our project to students at the High School Affiliated to Jilin University. They do not know much about the Synthetic Biology, so we gave a brief introduction about Synthetic Biology and the iGEM competition at the beginning. Then we gave a detailed description about our project. The possibility of using bacteriotherapy to cure cancer was the major topic of our talk, as the major approaches to treat cancer have been radiotherapy, chemotherapy and surgery. We told the students how we designed our genes and how we electrotransfered them into bifidobacteriums. We also explained how our system worked. We also invited them to visit our lab. Not many students showed much interests in our presentation at the beginning of our presentation. However, more and more students showed great interest about our project during our presentation. After we finished our speech, we gave them the e-mail address of our team. Those who are interested in our project could contact our team and get more detailed information about our project and synthetic biology.

We think our presentation stimulate their interest in science. We want to introduce more about biological science to those high school students in the future, and we hope some of them will be iGEMers latter!

To spread public awareness of our project, we completed a iGEM booklet to introduce "What is Synthetic Biology?" and "What is solid tumor and how to treat it". As an educational booklet, knowledge is carefully summarized. Background information, social situation, and critical learning questions are all included so that people with limited Biology background could easily learn something from the booklet.

We have already shared our booklet with teachers all over the city, the country, and even the world! Here in Jilin University, we joined a TED JLU talk and our booklets were present as a gift to the teachers and students. In addition, we have given our booklet to students, teachers, and people from other walks of life all over the state. In the HUST-Cheering Meeting,we provided our booklet to other iGEM teams and exchanged ideas with them. Two students helped bring some booklets to Los Angeles, America, as well as Stockholm, Sweden. And in Boston, during the Gaint Jamboree, we will hand out our booklet to others as well.

Three Different edited version of the booklet have been printed, better and better. And we are still working on fulfilling the information for our booklet. Currently, we are working on providing the some updated statistics so that people can have a bigger view of tumor.

The information we provided and taught to students and adults will inspire them to look into Synthetic Biology. We have already received many positive responses and we feel certain that this enthusiasm for Synthetic Biology will carry them into the future. Additionally, people learn about tumor and a healthy style of life will be pursued. Our educational synthetic biology activities booklet will be available online for anyone to use for free as soon as we get our final edition.