Team:ZJU-China/humanpractice.htm

This year, ZJU-China had tremendous interesting ideas about human practice and actually did research about it. With the spirit of share and fun, here comes our HP creative idea workshop, aiming to provide brilliant and workable thoughts about iGEM human practice for future teams, and trying to develop insights of a real effective human practice. Needless to say, we even try some ideas of our workshop. Well, it went well!

Let’s take a look at what we tried this year! ZJU-China held a special event called "Scaffold in your eyes" in campus, and attracted a lot of attention. ZJU-China created a cute love story to illustrate our main idea of project, then we made an animation of this story, "a love story between Syn & Bio", in which we even create our own song. It is so interesting and so fun, definitely worth seeing! Additionally, ZJU-China thought ethical thinking is also crucial, and apart from the safety sheet we undergraduate researchers have to think about, we left the question directly to our freshmen in their first English Speech Contest.

HP creative idea workshop

Actually, the idea of doing such a workshop comes from ZJU Jamboree. We saw so many inspired human practices in our Jamboree, which will make iGEM really fun. ZJU-China is eager to share all these to other iGEMers from all over the world, and present the thoughts of our SBC members to the world.

Some of them made pokers which have previous iGEM programs’ abstracts on each card, some even create a brand-new Card Game.

Let’s take a look at one of our SBC member, Yue Zhang’s idea.

Card game: Methane Killer

In the game cards are divided into four categories: methane cards, gene cards, bacteria cards, instructions cards and life cards.

Methane cards: cause a damage for the rival.

Gene cards: include alarm gene 1, 2, 3 and methane eating gene, which can build alarming factory and methane swallowing factory with bacteria cards according to certain rules.

Alarming gene 1+2+3 + bacteria cards= methane alarming factory: makes the attack of your rival invalid after you show the alarm starting card.

methane eating gene+ bacteria cards= methane swallowing factory: make the methane card put down by your rival into your hand after you show the swallow starting card.

instructions cards: the alarming starting card, swallowing starting card

Alarm frozen cards, swallow frozen cards: make the rival's alarming factories and swallowing factory invalid in a cycle.

Alarm thaw cards, swallow thaw cards: make the rival 's alarm frozen cards, swallow frozen cards invalid in a cycle

Life cards: every card has five red dots;you will lose a dots if you get an effective attack.

At the beginning of the game, each player will get a piece of life card and 2 pieces of methane cards.Each player take two cards from the Pile (including four categories), confront with the rival according to the function of the cards.the one who lose the five red dots first is the failer.

HP creative idea workshop still has a lot to do afterwards; we are going to conduct a real research to serious think about humanity and science, which will be described in detail in our future work.

"Scaffold in your eyes"

RNA Scaffold is flexible in designing, which makes it perfectly applicable in many biological pathways and acts different roles in biological systems in vivo. And designing is the most important and highlighted part of our project, we want to share the "design and re-design" concept in synthetic biology with the public. According to that, we came up with "Scaffold in your eyes". There’s a famous movie at that time in China, "You Are the Apple of My Eye". Both the Chinese and English name of this activity borrowed part of that movie, which successfully catch public’s attention. We design our scaffolds follow certain principles, one of them is that we still use the PP7 & MS2 binding site. We post the activity on our university’s BBS, and hang up posters on each dormitory hall. Then we set site in the center of campus, provided color pen and paper with the shape of PP7 & MS2 binding site, asked them to draw whatever they like based on that, and introduced our idea of designing after that. Each of our participants received a chance in a small lottery afterwards, together with a synbio bookmark we made ourselves. Lots of people passed, stopped to take up the pen, and listened to our mini-presentations. We received more than 100 drawings. Besides, there’re foreign students and even a seven year old girl draw in this activity.

Poster:

"A love story between Syn & Bio"

Members of 2012 iGEM ZJU-China are versatile in many aspects. We decided to create an animation to illustrate our project in a more recreational way! Then, producing a music video bumped into our mind. ZJU-iGEM changed the lyrics of the song "I'm Yours" (sing by Jazon Mraz), draw the entire animation and finish the song all by ourselves during lab time. All of us felt so proud of it, and can’t wait to share with you.

It is a love story of Syn and Bio, they’re both genes in the same chromosome of a same E.coli. They are destined to transcribe and translated into enzymes, and they fall in love with each other when they’re still gene. As it was told, they’re going to play an important role, catalyzing in the same biological pathway, however, it’s still extremely hard to meet each other because the E.coli is so big! And of course, the efficiency of the pathway is very low because they’re separated. The young lovely couple S&B were in a broken heart, they’re just like Romeo and Juliet, Rose and Jack, Liang shanbo and Zhu Yingtai, Xu Xian and Bai Niangzi. However, ZJU-China believes in true love and won’t let this tragedy happen! We are going to send a RNA scaffold, it’s like a messenger with radar, help to find both enzymes and bind them in one scaffold. Thanks to ZJU-China, S and B could stay with each other happily ever after, catalyzing, catalyzing, catalyzing..

English Speech Contest

Critical thoughts in human practice are placed weight. ZJU-China this year collaborated with one specific English enhancing club of our university, Power of Voice (POV). We participate in their free developed speech section, and bring about three general questions concern about ethics in synthetic biology.

1 As a famous adage goes, scientific technique is a two-edged sword. What’s your opinion about transgene?

2 Synthetic Biology is to design and re-design a new biological system. Do you agree that human can create new creature in the future?

3 Do you think new technology like transgene will raise biosafety issues?

And among all the participants, there’s one student to get the first topic.

Dr. Yuhua Hu from Edinburgh University visiting our team

Dr. Yuhua Hu, the technologies manager of school of biology sciences, the university of Edinburgh, visited our team on August first. We briefly introduced our team and project to her. And she described the project and recent progress of Edinburgh team. Then we talked about the collaboration between two teams, and hoped to build a strong connection in the long run. We are all looking forward to the future collaboration of iGEM teams and students associations between Zhejiang University and Edinburgh University!

Peking team visiting our team

Seven team members of Peking team, Hongyu Xiong, Wenyuan Zhou, Sibai Sun, Hong Zhang, Wenming Xing, Tian Lu and Zidong Zhang visited us on July 27th. Before they came, we thought to work together on a project of Human Practice, addressing lectures related to iGEM and synthetic biology to high school students in Zhejiang Science and Technology Museum. This was a good project and also a rare chance, after all, Hangzhou was nearly 1600 kilometers away from Beijing. Peking team provided event planning and contacted with the person in charge of museum, our team designed and printed the post and tried to contacted with teachers of several high schools in Hangzhou. But due to summer holidays, it was difficult to call together highschool students. At last, we had to give up this project. It was really a pity. Anyway, our team communicated with Peking team happily. We exchanged the project and recent progress with each other, and had a wonderful dinner together! Though we can't collaborate on Human Practice this year, this visit no doubt strengthened the friendship between Peking team and ZJU team!

Terrific trip to UIUC

One of our team members, Xinyi Guo, reached out to the UIUC team and coincidentally discovered that both of our teams focus on RNA scaffold this year. The fact that we are all interested in developing RNA scaffolds as a full comprehensive project made us excited, and we had a deep talk about both our projects and specifically exchange ideas in scaffold characterizations.

Research about Human Practice

We are going to enrich the content of HP creative idea workshop by conducting a research focusing on the effectiveness and creativeness of human practice. By doing this, we’re trying to figure out the relation between humanity and science. People used to think science is a pretty serious stuff with lots of data and critical analysis (But it is only one aspect of being a scientist). Actually iGEM Human Practice provide us a good opportunity to combine a great number of other fields to science, and create amazing new things to introduce science concept to the society. And it is such an amazement that during the past few years, iGEMers from all over the world contribute their effort to explore this perspective. We find it extremely interesting to do research on this topic. We hope to summarize the previous iGEM project human practices, seek other successful cases which add different elements to science projects, and conclude the true inner beauty of Human practice and project outreach. By doing this, we intend to provide a whole picture of science and humanity in iGEM, and wish to inspire other iGEM team in some sense.

Ethic thinking and love project

From the experience of English speech contest, we find it necessary to create a chance for undergraduates to really think about new technology in biology as well as ethics in biosafety. And we’re thinking of organizing an English essay competition concerning about biosafety. It will certainly inspire our young biologists or even the general public, and provide a good chance for them to get to know about synthetic biology instead of receiving other’s opinions passively.

Collaborations with UIUC

Since our projects has a certain similarity, ZJU-China focusing on the improvement of the discrete RNA scaffold by adding riboswitch in order to make our own scaffold, while UIUC pay more attention on finding a new pathway by changing the scaffold’s RNA binding sites. We find it possible to discuss and collaborate with each other. We can help in modeling and they share experience in doing protein experiment with us. And ZJU-China also wants to explore more about biosafety in outreach with UIUC team.

Collaborations with Edinburgh University

Dr. Yuhua Hu from Edinburgh did a detailed interview about teamwork in iGEM project with almost every member in our 2012 iGEM ZJU-China team. We are very glad to share our stories with Dr.Yuhua Hu and participate in her research. There’s going to be another two interviews with all of our members around November.