Team:Fudan D/Human Practice

Brief Introduction

The word “iGemcyclopedia” is a fusion of two words “iGEM” and “encyclopedia”, which means that this dictionary is trying to provide as more information as possible about iGEM, especially the projects of all teams

Why is it developed?

As we all know, there are many complicated concepts and projects in the synthetic biology field. For some undergraduates, they may just know a little about the concepts related to bi-stable, optical sensor and genetic machine before entering the field. As a result, it will consume a long time and a hard work to turn herself or himself from an amateur into a professional who can understand the concepts and make use of them.

Consequently, we want to “synthesize” a completely new “pathway” for those beginners who are interested in the synthetic biology, to feel more and learn more, to touch the spirit of iGEM

Secondly, there’re so many iGEM teams in the history and will be more in the future, which means there will have thousands of wikis and papers to read every year for each person. And among them, many wikis might not be so reader-friendly. Therefore a better pattern than wiki is needed to develop recently.

Thirdly, while almost every year iGEMers attend to the lectures in the jamboree, reading the wikis, getting to know what other teams did in this year, they must have lots of new ideas and creative thoughts over these things. And we think the compilation of this dictionary could be a good way to save and keep their ideas, criticizes, and thinking on the recent works.

In a word, iGemcyclopedia was born to simplify, to help, and to inspire.

How it is developed?

The dictionary is made by us iGEMers from Fudan_D team.

That means every entry is written by us undergraduates, by the classic way – reading the wikis and papers, and then compiling each entry. It is becaus reading wiki, understand and figure out the spirit of it is still impossible for artificial intelligence nowadays that we must do these by ourselves rather than by any software or programs.

Furthermore, since iGEMers always read wikis, articles, and reports, we want to run the iGemcyclopedia in the strategy of Wikipedia in the near future – to allow every iGEMers be able to read and edit it; as a result, iGemcyclopedia could become a community where we learn and share.

The Target Audience

The target audiences are as listed as the following:

1st. Those laymen who want to learn about iGEM and synthetic biology as soon as possible after she or he has read the some general introduction, and before she or he has start to search the recent articles and reports on journals.

2nd. Designers who want to know whether her or his idea is innovative in a short time rather than reading every team’s wiki.

3rd. iGEMers who want to learn more about some perspectives of iGEM – such as the popular standard parts, popular system design, popular questions iGEMers want to answer, and the culture of iGEM.

4th. iGEMers who may have a problem in reading certain wiki and other related materials.

Q&A

Q:What is the difference between the iGemcyclopedia and the database of parts? Since we can search promoters, proteins and other parts from database conveniently, why do we need such a dictionary?

A:First of all, the iGemcyclopedia provides not only the information of standard parts, but also entries which show the ideas, concepts, project designs and all the other goods in the history of iGEM.

As a result, the advantage of iGemcyclopedia is obvious:

The database is not satisfactory and user-friendly enough when we have a good idea and need to find probable parts, or when we want to acquire the experience of the usage of certain parts; While in the iGemcyclopedia, the related works, which cannot be found in majority of the general databases, will be shown as an example to help us understood the usage of this promoter or protein – just like illustrative sentences in the Longman dictionary to help readers to acquire the skill to utilize this word or expression.

Moreover, while everyone wants his or her idea got from the brainstorming to be a really innovative one, s/he may sadly finds out it is just some old stories which has been studied years ago after working on it for a period. In the past, it was likely to happen since no database can help you to make a conclusion, but this time, with the iGemcyclopedia, you can get some advices from those entries about projects and concepts, helping you to decide to work on this idea or not.

Q:Though iGemcyclopedia sounds wonderful, it must have some disadvantages or shortcomings. So in which case it cannot provide enough information for the users?

A:For designers, if they want to get the sequence information etc. of a certain gene, they had better search the database. Although iGemcyclopedia is trying to show every corners of iGEM, it cannot replace the database. In fact , we want this to make up for the disadvantages of the database and to help iGEMers have a better experience with it

Q:How to use iGemcylopedia?

A:All the information is illustrate by entries.

The entries are arranged in alphabetical order.

The entries are designed as the following:

An example is shown as the following:

We build a pleasant cooperation with the school broadcasting station and one of the campus newspapers, FDUer Weekly. Through the way of listening and reading combined, we aim at providing the basic information of systematic biology and the latest news of our project compressively.

We closely cooperate with an academic association, the association of Bertalanffy. We participate in the routine activities of the group, such as lectures, seminars, paper/case study. Not only the experience of research is shared, but also various questions are raised up and warmly discussed. The atmosphere of internal learning is well built up.

In order to attract more university students, especially those out of the field of biology, to have a glance of, or even devote themselves to synthetic biology, the association held a recruiting and finally recruited 31 new members on Sep.20th, 2012. Hundreds of students stopped and had a browse of our previous iGEM project, as well as got to know something about synthetic biology. We are so pleased to make a fairly open sharing.

What’s more, the other team of Fudan University, Fudan-Luxtogether takes part in the routine work and recruitment and we had a nice interaction and cooperation.

As the saying goes that, “All work and no play, makes Jack a dull boy!” we make effort to develop a relative entertaining style of learning. Here we designed a simple game called “” , which gives you an opportunity to culture your own bacterium!

Here are some tips about the game:

 You can switch freely between the parts of synthesis scene and the feeding scene.

 In the feeding scene, your bacterium will get poisoned, shine or have score doubled depending on the food it eats.

 In the parts synthesis scene, you will get different functional parts (poison, bomb, shine and double score) according to the specific sequences made by A, T, C, G.

 You score will be recorded. The game will be over once the score is below zero.

Bio-safety has become a fiercely debated topic since genetically modified organisms came to our life, and is of great importance in International Genetically Engineered Machine Competition (iGEM). Meanwhile, the main goal of our team is closely related to bio-safety, and is one of the most important parts of our work. To popularize the basic knowledge of bio-safety and make a contribution to this problem, we hold a lecture named ‘iGEM and Bio-safety’ to students (including all team members and other students who are interested in the area) on May 5th, 2012.

In the lecture, we gave a brief introduction of the definition of bio-safety, rules and laws, the history and latest progress of bio-safety, bio-safety in synthetic biology and what we should do to ensure bio-safety in our project. We shared some ideas about the relationship between our project and bio-safety, and discussed several questions such as what we could do to protect the experimenters from lab accidents and how to avoid the unwanted use of experiment products with students after the lecture.

The lecture was praised by the students who participated in. We received emails discussing our theme and a few of them gave us some useful advice. One suggestion is to combine the technology-orientated training and laboratorial training to ensure the bio-safety in the lab, and we all thought that it was a great idea.

In the theme of ‘Learning & Sharing’, we shared the idea about bio-safety, as well as the system we designed to improve bio-safety in genetically modified organism, and gain a deeper understanding of this topic in this lecture .

We have been sharing the cutting-edge researches in the field of synthetic biology on our homepage, so that our followers are able to get the latest research progress in this field. Furthermore, if they have any questions, we can reply and answer them just in time. We guarantee that we get instructions from the professors regularly to make sure that we will not make any scientific mistakes.

As for the communication with other teams, it is rather easy to get in touch with them through the social networks. We have launched our own public homepage on Renren, Sina Weibo, Facebook. These works shorten the distance between us immediately. We can easily say hi to Tokyo University on twitter, and ask questions to @igemheadquarters. Searching through Sina-Weibo helped us to find other iGEM teams; we started to know the team from Xiamen University (XMU) in this way! After ‘flirting’ with their homepage, we found that we were all struggling with the experiments that didn't work out well, and instead of giving up, we encouraged each other and shared the experience, which helped us to solve the problems. Also, on the website renren.com, we saw the human practice works from University of Science and Technology of China (USTC), and learned a lot from their video. Their idea of introducing synthetic biology to children is awesome!

The best part of those communication works is that we can really talk to each team regardless of the huge distances between us. Through all these communications, we made friends to each other. Put aside the competition and the final result, friendship always comes first!

See you guys at the Jamboree!!!