Team:ECUST/HP/Integrated/igem club
As the first team taking part in iGEM on behalf of ECUST, we not only try our best to finish our own project, but want to convey the spirit of iGEM to our fellow students. Therefore, we set up an iGEM club in our campus in order to provide a platform for students to exchange academic knowledge and give them guidance on participating in iGEM competition.
On the evening of October 11, we held a teach-in forum to introduce our club to our fellow students who major in the School of Biotechnology.
The introduction mainly consists of three parts.
The first part mainly focuses on the club itself. In this part, we explained the importance and necessity of setting up such a club, the goal of this organization, the structure of it, and last but not least, the routine activities which includes club meetings, community open day, competitions, setting up teams and so on.
The second part lays emphasis on the introduction of iGEM competition and synthetic biology. In this part, we told our schoolmates the definition, principle, mechanism and foreground of iGEM and synthetic biology. To make it easier to understand, we also gave an example. By means of synthetic biology, we are supposed to build a robot. If you give it a blow, it will hit back; if you give it two blows, it will continue to hit back by giving you two blows; if you give it three blows, it will run away. In this process, “you” serve as the environment, “blow or not” and “how many blows” serve as information, “perception of blows” serve as a switch, and “hit back” and “run away” are responses to environment. However, this kind of robots are not made by mechanical components, but genes and organisms. That’s where synthetic biology can take us.
The final part concentrates on outstanding projects of previous competitions. We introduced 4 projects in total, including Ecolibrium, “FRES(H)”, Bioremediator and Light Harvester. We hope that through these excellent projects, students can gain a better understanding of synthetic biology and a passion to take part in iGEM.
With students full of classroom, the teach-in forum was a great success. Not only did we obtain warm applause from the audience, but many students came to us wanting to know more details about iGEM and Synbio. We believe that by means of this club, we can certainly carry forward our culture and spirit, which will motivate us to keep improving ourselves and try to achieve better results in iGEM.
