Team:SUSTech Shenzhen/HP/Silver
Meeting with interesting spirits
Human Practice
Contents
Promoting communication between classic science and synthetic biology
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
