Team:SUSTech Shenzhen/HP/Silver

Team SUSTC-Shenzhen

Meeting with interesting spirits

Human Practice

In the interdisciplinary project, we focused on the communication between people from synthetic biology and other fields, such as behavioral psychology, optogenetics and brain imaging science. We hope that it will spark new ideas in using synthetic biology to study neuroscience and behavioral psychology. Meanwhile, this activity will also promote cutting edging development in synthetic biology to our fellow undergraduate student. Moreover, our engagement in public awareness successfully spread the knowledge of C. elegans and synthetic biology in neighboring communities.


Promoting communication between classic science and synthetic biology

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People at the seminar

To promote communication between different fields and spread concept of synthetic biology, we co-hosted a seminar and a synthetic biology lecture with Prof. Zhihao Li at Shenzhen University. In the seminar, we shared the philosophy of synthetic biology, “build life to understand it”, and its engineering principle, methodology with Prof. Li. We also learned recent progress in the technology of brain imaging science. After the inspiring conversation, we purposed to deliver light-sensitive channels into necrotic neurons of human brain and activate them with light.

In the lecture, we mainly talked about synthetic biology and brain imaging science. In the first session, we gave the audience an introduction of the latest advancement of brain imaging method and the importance of integration it with synthetic biology approaches.

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Introduction to classical brain imaging methods
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Prof. Li interacting with audiences

In the second session, we concentrated on the ideas, methodologies and applications of synthetic biology. This is also our effort to promote the idea of applying engineering principles in biological research and our daily life.

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Synthetic biology introduction

This experience reinforced our understanding of the importance of interdisciplinary communication. We also made efforts to promote the principles of synthetic biology. For the undergraduate audience, we sincerely hope that this lecture could provide them a perspective of the new biology disciplines, and convincing them to learn more about synthetic biology.


Educating junior high school students on synthetic biology

To further promote synthetic biology, we gave a series of lectures on synthetic biology as wells our current and previous iGEM project to a group of 40 junior school students from Sichuan province. They also visited our lab and showed great interest in synthetic biology.

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Education program of Sichuan's junior high school

In the lecture about our current project, we mainly introduced optogenetics and several interesting studies including the Havard hybrid stingray. Besides, we also introduced some classical ethological and psychological experiments including Pavlov's dog and Skinner box which inspired our experiments. Finally we gave them a chance to use the microscope to observe the C. elegans we are working on.

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Talking about interesting facts about C. elegans
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Observing living C. elegans

We also showed them the optical and microfluidic devices we built for the project. Most of them had never been in a research lab before. We believe many of them will remember this experience for a long time. We also successfully shown them that science, especially synthetic biology is really fun!


Cohosting iGEM Southern China Regional Meeting

2017 Southern China Regional Meeting was hold in Shenzhen at April 29. Our team helped Shenzhen University iGEM team to organize the meet-up. 

It provided the teams from Southern China with a great opportunity to showcase our inspirations and projects, and share our thoughts on the projects of other teams. It also facilitated a number of collaborations between teams. Another purpose of the meeting was to provide the high school teams with an opportunity to find help from college teams. At least 4 high school teams in Shenzhen found help from more experienced iGEM teams.

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iGEM Southern China Regional Meeting group photo

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Visiting and communicating in SUSTech

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Meeting Handbook of iGEM Southern China Regional Meeting

Made by from the elegans.Inc in SUSTech_Shenzhen.

Licensed under CC BY 4.0.