Team:Tsinghua/HP/Gold Integrated

Yeasy AFT human practice page

Conferences and seminars

Experience Sharing Session

Nanjing, China 5.20.2017

We joined in experience sharing session, held by Fudan University, in Nanjing, China. In this session, undergraduate students from different teams shared our thoughts and experience about team construction, project design, human practice and challenge we were facing. Xiao Ge and Dongyan Liu provided some advice to other teams and shared the fundamental design and progress of our project.

Biology Undergraduates Development Symposium (BUDS)

Nanjing, China 5.21.2017

BUDS contains a serious of academic practices for participants, including the poster session, oral lecture and visiting Model Animal Research Center of Nanjing University. During this symposium, we presented a poster about our project and received a lot of feedback about experimental design and workflow. Our poster was chosen as the best poster in this symposium.

Communication with Beijing Genomics Institute(BGI)

Shenzhen China, 8.7.2017

We visited BCI, which is one of the best institutes of synthetic biology in China, and communicate with their director and researchers. Though this activity, we learned more about the development of synthetic biology in China and received some valuable suggestion for our project.

Conference of China iGEMer Committee

Fuzhou, China, 8.23-24.2017

During CCiC, we communicated with other teams about the experimental design, experience and future direction of iGEM in China. We also took part in poster session to introduce our project to other teams and learned projects of other teams. We received “certificated participant” award.

Communication with other teams

With SZU-China

Team members from SZU-China told us something about bio-microcapsule, which is quite inspiring for our product design.

With XMU-China

XMU-China proposed that microfluidics might be a useful technique for AFT detection.

Survey on citizens

To know what the potential customers want and what they can do, we designed a questionnaire and spread it in neighborhoods in Beijing, Tianjin, Taiyuan, Guangdong and so on.
Considering that glucometer is the final procedure of our biosensor, we surveyed how many citizens own glucometer. As it turned out, 28.7% of surveyed citizens have a glucometer. Though not that much, it indicates that using glucometer as readout is feasible.

To target potential customers that may not want to buy a new glucometer to test AFT, we also considered using color as readout. However, it seems that yeast is not easy to get colorful and the coral chromoprotein spisPink cannot change yeast’s color. So this is not involved in our final design.
We also want to know whether citizens are willing to let our biosensor ferment for several hours in their home, so we asked whether they have fermentation experiences. As it turned out, 58.3% of investigated citizens do have their experiences to ferment something at home. This is a good news for the spread of our product.

Except for product design, we also want to know how citizens are familiar with AFT. The result is not that satisfying. Only 61.6% of surveyed people know that AFT cannot be depleted by any kind of cooking method. This may leave the 38.4% believing that, although AFT can cause cancer, it cannot do harm to our health because we eat cooked food instead of raw ones, which is absolutely not the truth.

At the same time, despite most people know that AFT can contaminate nuts, oil and crops, only 8.2% know that it can also contaminate meat and dairy products. This may also weaken their alerts when choosing meat and dairy products.

All these indicate that we still need to strengthen the propagation of AFT safety issue. So we investigated how people get safety information. According to the questionnaire result, TV program and Facebook counterparts (like WeChat, QQ and so on) are the major information source, indicating that propagation in these two ways is the most efficient.

Ten-Year Tsinghua iGEM!

Ten-year Tsinghua iGEM

To retrospect the history of Tsinghua iGEM and summarize our experience, we interviewed some former member of Tsinghua iGEM and made a documentary video about the history and development of iGEM in Tsinghua University. Former members of Tsinghua iGEM not only recalled their memory in Tsinghua iGEM but provided some important suggestion for our project.

You are free to visit our interview log on http://www.jianshu.com/u/6c4739eed261

Enterprise visit

We visited iCarbonX, an enterprise established in 2015, which has become one of the most influential companies in the field of bioinformatics. We exchanged ideas about current health care market and how to release the potential of the product derived from our aflatoxin detection system. Though this activity, we learned a lot about the tendency of Chinese healthcare market as well as the great potential of our product considering the practical application. What we learned helps a lot in our product design.