Background

The Human Practice section of Tianjin iGEM 2012, considering the knowledge and demand of Chinese public, aims at popularizing the Chinese citizens’ interest to Synthetic Biology and iGEM by building a series of network platforms to publicize interesting and abundant education material. Meanwhile, we hold a variety of activities labeled 'daily joy' along with academic information, to evoke the interest in the specific field for students from middle schools and universities. Seek for a Safer Future, trying to make public have a further sense of the development of transgenic technology and the hazard of gene contamination, enjoys a positive response among virtual and realistic society. Our idea extends to more scientists and teams with the help of the handbooks and summary from academic part of our activity. After all, more attention is desired to prove that we are plotting a bright future belonged to Synthetic Biology in a positive way.

SynBio Museum of China

Our Science Expo Network, considered to be a great attempt in synthetic biology, aims to introduce the knowledge and the future development of the synthetic biology to China, a potential country in the field of scientific research and economic cooperation. We make full advantages of Chinese four mainstream SNS (www.weibo.com; www.douban.com; www.blog.sina.com.cn; www.renren.com;) to enlarge the popularity of synthetic among different ages, occupations and educational backgrounds, mainly Chinese new generation of intellectuals.

    We regularly publish science articles and conduct public activities, to enforce Chinese citizens understand more about synthetic biology and iGEM by text, images games, and competition. The establishment of the network platform ensures a rapid dissemination of information and a tremendous amount of reading materials. We earned a lot consensus and a widespread attention just in one month. Addition to the great charm and potential of synthetic biology, our innovation to spread the knowledge is a significant factor. 

Visit To Nankai

Human Practice is not only a bridge that connects the world in IGEM, but also a dynamo to transmit the idea of Synthetic Biology to the majority. As a novel scientific discipline, Synthetic Biology is not widely spread among the public, even in the young students. Our Human Practice popularizes the idea of Biology and Biosafety to two prestigious schools, Nankai University and Nankai Middle School. To bring Nankai University, whose School of Life Sciences enjoys high reputation for its research capacity, into IGEM and high school students with interest in Biology, a series of academic lecture and collaboration had been organized, aiming to popularize IGEM and Synthetic Biology.

Biosafety Handbook & Regulation Summary

To extend our values, Focusing on Genetic Pollution, Seeking for a Safer Future, a lot of effort had been made in academic area. Drawing the materials of safety in last 4 years’ IGEM as a blueprint and taking the modern idea of preventing gene contamination as a reference, a safety handbook, focusing on operation, social impact, and Synthetic Biology method has been published to provide more safety options for the specific area. What’s more, we hope to share our ideas with other teams by analyzing the importance of our project, AegiSafe O-Key , in Gene Safety area. The aim of Synthetic Biology is to apply engineering system to enrich the functions of cell. The crucial point is that how can we perform the ability of modified cells completely. Dring the whole process, the most important step is the construction of the regulation system. Some of the team in 2011 concerned the method of regulation as core part, and the others proposed a new regulation routine. By generalizing these ideas, we hope to produce a summary as a reference.

The Map & Modeling

This section enjoys the most notable part of our Synthetic Biology Museum. Our iGem team from TJU drew a Synthetic Biology Map according to the development history of Synthetic Biology and focusing on some major breakthroughs and key scientists, which attracted more attention and popularized the idea of Synthetic Biology., the novel discipline. What’s more, we have built five models to analyze and evaluate genetic pollution towards the hazard of gene contamination, the influence on public attitude, the universality of environment problem, the publicity degree of the project and the completeness of the project respectively.