We know deeply that our experiment and design is interrelated to the community. In fact, our purpose offor this project is to provide a cheaper, faster yet a more specific and precise method for diagnosis of H3N2 virus. Therefore, apart from the experimental and designing work, we put much effort on human practices as well. These human practices categorized as local competition, workshops, idea exchange and public engagement. Details are shown in below and Public Engagement page.

Idea Exchange

Biosafety Sharing Session by HKU iGEM

On 11^th August, 2017 several iGEM teams were gathered in the University of Hong Kong to share their projects. And a Biosafety Talk was conducted by the DIYBIO company of Hong Kong. The five project sharing iGEM teams were: Hong_Kong_HKU (University of Hong Kong) Hong_Kong_HKUST (University of Science and Technology) Hong_Kong-CUHK (the Chinese University of Hong Kong) SUSTech_Shenzhen (Southern University of Science and Technology) Hong_Kong_UCCKE (United Christian College (Kowloon East)) HK_SKHLPSS (S.K.H. Li Ping Secondary School)

This activity serve as an important channel for us to present the usage of the latest nanotechnology to the public. Overall, public showed immense interest nanotechnology because firstly, this is a rather new era in diagnostic aspect. Also,this technology still has infinite possibilities in future usage. Hence, we are pleased to introduce the prosperous future for this kind of nanotechnology.

This kind of idea exchange is also exceptionally important to our project in the way that we could listen to others what we could do to enhance our works. All opinions are so valuable that we might have omitted before, boosting our confidence in designing our nano-cube for iGEM competition.

Workshops

First visit of team from University of Hong Kong (HKU) to our school

In early March, seven members from team HKU visited our school. In the workshop, our team members introduced our previous project relating to nanotechnology to them. We shared how we are inspired to design a nano-device to detect E.coli. We showed the structure of our nano-device and how specific it was to work with E. coli. On the other hand, as a returning iGEM participant, team HKU shared their valuable experience in participating previous iGEM competition, as well as gave us useful advice participating in this competition.

Since the project from team HKU last year was about nanotechnology as well, they briefly introduced their works last year. We were deeply impressed by their creativity in designing a complex tetrahedral structure, which is much more difficult than our 2D nano-device used in our previous project. Looking back, as building up a nano-cube rely heavily on imagination; their precious sharing on their previous works had inspired us a lot.

Second visit of team HKU to our school

Second visit took place at our school in early-April. Three of HKU team members came to our school and gave us an extensive lecture relating to synthetic biology. They taught us some advance and recent DNA nanotechnology, ranging from some basic ideas such as the fundamental unit of DNA, to the application of using nanotechnology to tackle molecular medical issue. All these have enriched our DNA engineering knowledge beyond our biology textbook, connecting us to the worldwide actual research era nowadays.

Plus, they demonstrated to us how to extract DNA in our saliva in a small laboratory activity. This demonstration is utterly useful in the way that it provided us a tool to educate public what DNA actually is and how we can demonstrate the “visibility” of DNA to the public, so as to arouse their interest towards DNA technology.

iGEM Asia Team Leader’s Workshop

On 17^th June, we participated in iGEM Asia Team Leader’s workshop organized by Professor King Chow from HKUST. In this workshop, several successful teams in previous iGEM competition came and shared with us their valuable experience. Plus, members from iGEM Safety Committee delivered very useful safety guidelines to us so as to leading us to go through our competition safely.