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Team:USTC-Software/hp.html
From 2012.igem.org
Over the years, this competition has seen great efforts in pushing synthetic biology forward. Every year, teams from all over the world try their best to promote iGEM and synthetic biology in their schools, communities and cities. Human practice has been not only a window for more and more people to know about iGEM, but also a good opportunity for iGEMers to share the fun and happiness, an opportunity to make a difference.
Yes, make a difference, make a difference in people's lives so that they can not only know more about iGEM, but also feel the fun and happiness of learning something new. And there is no better way of making impact than promoting iGEM among children. So it click to us that it would be great if we could do human practice in the kindergarten.
At first, when we told people that we would like to do human practice in a kindergarten, they thought us crazy. They said it would be impossible to make them understand what plasmids are. It certainly is, but the goal of human practice is not trying to make these children experts in synthetic biology, but playing with them, letting them discover something new while playing and having a good memory in the end.
So we designed several interactive and immersive activities for those kids, and communicated with the teachers in the kindergarten of USTC, asked them for advice and what to expect when dealing with kids. Those activities include painting, drawing, stickers that kindergarten children know and love. With all the preparations done, it's time to carry them out.
Kindergarten of USTC seats in the east of the USTC East campus, and it has a long history of innovative education among pre-school children. Class of Science is one of the innovations there, every year, Class of Science invites professors, teachers and students from USTC to do interesting activities with the children, during which they learn interesting facts about robots, biology, physics and so on. We were blown away by their talents and curiosity when we saw them, and it made us believe that we could work it out and get the message across. We did, and here is an excerpt from Kaifeng's diary. We hope you feel the happiness and excitement as much as we do.
An excerpt from Kaifeng Chen's diary
Date: 14/06/2012
Weather: Sunny
Today my team members and I went to the kindergarten at USTC for iGEM human practice. Even though, before that, we had practiced for several times in advance, we still found a little nervous and excited about this one-day activity. We prepared three games for the lovely kindergarten children: knowledge about DNA structure, evolution tree, pictures of E coli. structure.
At about 8:00, we all arrived at the kindergarten. The header master helped lead us to watch all the cute boys and girls do their morning exercises. After that, we were ready to begin our activity.
Our first topic was about the DNA structure. I myself was one of the "teachers" with my coworker Litong Jiang. I could not imagine how happy I was to see these little boys and girls looking curiously at the pictures and us. At first, we showed the kids one big painted picture with different colors representing different types of nucleobase. In the picture, "A" was in red, "T" in blue, "G" in green and "C" in yellow. Then we told the children to draw the pictures according to our sample. When I walked around to take pictures, wow, a boy told me that he had known something about DNA from his father who teaches biology! Litong Jiang also helped the kids to complete this task ardently. After that, we showed the big picture again and then explain how DNA works in our bodies.
Then we moved on to another class. This time was for Chao Xu and Yunlong Zheng's turn. Before the game started, they showed the children a cartoon tree with different kinds of animals on the branches of the tree. They began to introduce the animals from the bottom to the top of the tree. A clever and active boy always held his hands and said the name of the animal aloud. After their explanation, we distributed pictures to every boy and girl. At the same time, the children got a set of stickers. Next, the little boys and girls started working and enjoying the process attaching the stickers on the right place on the evolution tree. After about 15 minutes, Zheng drew the children' attention and explained that the direction of evolution is from aquatics to terrestrials, and from simplicity to complexity.
The third part was about the structure of E coli., We chose this topic because E coli. is a very commonly used creature in both synthetic biology research and iGEM competitions. The purpose of this special designed game was to foster the interest in biology among all the kids. Qi Hu and Kaishuai Yang undertook this part. Firstly they presented a picture of the structure of an E coli. In the meantime, they let the boys and girls guess what function the certain structure had. When they pointed at the cell wall, a boy answered without consideration:" The cell wall can protect the E coli." We were really so amazed by his answer and praised him of his smartness. Soon, the children were asked to complete the structure of E coli. on their own pictures. After all these assignments were done, we began to attribute gifts to every child and finally took a group photo.
After these three main tasks for today, we later interviewed some teachers in the kindergarten and they thought highly of our activity. Tonight when reviewing the pictures I took in today's event, I could still feel the happiness playing with those kindergarten children. This activity is so successful and wonderful for my team and also so meaningful to me.
This century saw the increasing popularity of synthetic biology, which is a combination of biology, chemistry, physics, mathematics, computer science, etc. Greater importance comes with greater concern about the safety and security issues. As a software team, we are not facing the same issues that may caused by bacteria, chemicals and contaminating materials. Still, we are concerned with the possibility of safety problems maybe in or caused our project. We have listed the answers to the safety questions as follows.
1.Q: Would any of your project ideas raise safety issues in terms of :
Researcher safety,
Public safety, or
Environmental safety?
A: No. Our project serves to help researchers design the feasible biological circuits with certain behavior, and thus relieve them from heavy experimental work in the lab. And all parts that we suggest are coming from natural E. Coli that have been fully sequenced and understood. So plans generated from our software simulate the behavior researchers want with things that can be found in nature. Therefore, our project will not raise safety issues in terms of researchers, public and environments.
2.Q: Do any of the new BioBrick parts (or devices) that you made this year raise any safety issues? If yes,
did you document these issues in the Registry?
how did you manage to handle the safety issue?
How could other teams learn from your experience?
A: No. As a software team, we will not submit any BioBrick parts or devices. The parts we use in this project encodes non-hazardous genes and the data are from the registry and other databases that are widely recognized.
3.Q: Is there a local biosafety group, committee, or review board at your institution?
If yes, what does your local biosafety group think about your project?
If no, which specific biosafety rules or guidelines do you have to consider in your country?
A: Yes. The project in under the instruction of School of Life Sciences in University of Science and Technology of China. And with the supervision of our instructors and advisors, we are sure that our software development project will not raise any kind of issues in terms of researcher safety, public safety and environmental safety.
4.Q: Do you have any other ideas how to deal with safety issues that could be useful for future iGEM competitions? How could parts, devices and systems be made even safer through biosafety engineering?
A: Yes. (1) We suggest the registry of standard biological parts should have a dedicated safety page of every part to ensure that users would not raise any safety issue when using them. (2) In addition to safety usage of single part, a database should be setup to store the possible safety issue when using several parts together. (3) With the safety page and database, team of the software development track can write softwares that help researchers search safety issues that may be caused by their experiments.
