Team:Nanjing China Bio/outreach

Community Outreach
Introduce the concept of synthetic biology, the principle of iGEM and our latest work to the community.


Lecture in Jinling High School
On the afternoon of 18th September, the volunteers of our iGEM team gave a lecture at Jinling High School in downtown Nanjing. We introduced the basic knowledge of molecular and synthetic biology to the students, and helped them comprehend how to modify Salmonella Typhimurium through molecular experiments to increase their ability of tumor targeting and decrease their toxicity in order to be suitable for clinical treatments. We later presented iGEM High School Division part which they showed great interest in. We encouraged them to take part in the division and would like to help them with all our efforts. After the lecture, we had a great time talking with the students. They were curious about the biology world and asked many questions related to our work.



Communication with Southeast University (SEU)
On 20th September, 3 members of our team went to SEU and had a seminar with students there. They knew our work quite well because we had cooperation with the iGEM team of SEU during the summer vacation. We mainly introduced some characteristics of bacteria therapy from other normal therapies like high colonization and capability of carrying multiple exogenous genes of bacteria. During the seminar, they raised many valuable questions and offered many suggestions on our experiment methods. We further discussed on the safety problems of bacteria therapy and came up with some ideas trying to solve them.






Lecture in Nanjing University
On 21st September, we presented our work to the teachers and students of School of Life Science in Nanjing University on Xianlin Campus. We introduced the advantages for VNP20009, the bacteria we used, to be applied in bacteria treatment and the detailed method to optimize the bacteria, which is to screen auxotrophic strains and transfect anaerobic promoters into the bacteria to enhance their efficiency of tumor targeting and killing cancer cells. In the end of our lecture, we made our outlook on the future of tumor targeting therapy with bacteria. The professors gave high praises on our work and offered many constructive comments.