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Team:Peking/HumanPractice/Outreach/Collaboration
From 2012.igem.org
Summary
In order to get in touch with the high schools in Beijing and to ensure our propagation of Synthetic Biology to be a long-term project, we went to Beijing Teenageer Science & Technology Club for help and gave a presentation to the chief secretary and other teachers. Our efforts impressed them and finally we agreed to work together. The club also paved the way for our lectures.
Reciprocal visit with Prof. Yang Yi
& Request for VVD
Greatly inspired by the elaborate design of an ultrasensitive, light-controlled and genetically encoded transactivator Gal4-VVD [1], Peking 2012 iGEM team, who intend to introduce a similar light-switchable transgene system into E. coli, invited Prof. Yi Yang from East China University of Science and Technology to come to Peking and communicate with the team members. Later, Peking 2012 team members also made another visit to Prof. Yang.
The publication [1] of an ultra photosensitive, genetically encoded positive regulator, Gal4-VVD, which is rationally designed to enjoy a high spatiotemporal specificity and efficiency, greatly enlightened the Peking 2012 iGEM team on its primitive aim for programming cells to function and communicate through light.
By sharing a mutual concern of introducing a similar system into E. coli for synthetic biological application, Prof. Yi Yang from East China University of Science and Technology and our team paid reciprocal visits to each other. During Prof. Yang’s visit to Peking University on 21st April, we established a consensus for the basic construction of further cooperation and shared a common view on the basic design of a LexA-VVD genetic regulator.
Two months later, deputy team leader Wenyuan Nathan Zhou and team member Jiawei Yan visited Yang lab in Shanghai to exchange ideas on experimental data & details and to obtain Prof. Yang’s prototype of genetic construction of the fusion protein.
This very cooperation is not only beneficial to both sides, but also provides an opportunity for future collaborations.
Figure 4. On June 20th, we went to the office of the Beijing Teenager Science & Technology Club, and gave a presentation to teachers in all high schools in Beijing.
On June 20th, some of us went to the office of the Beijing Teenager Science & Technology Club, and gave a presentation to Ms Zhou Lin, the Chief Secretary of the club and all other teachers who are responsible for the science affairs of their own schools. The presentation was very successful! The teachers not only realized the basic ideas of Synthetic Biology and the concept of iGEM, but also they figured out the long-term potential of this subject, and the meaning of iGEM to students --- motivating them to study Synthetic Biology in a collaboratary and interdisciplinary atmosphere and to become excellent synthetic biologists in the future.
Ms Zhou Lin rejoicingly told us that she was impressed by our efforts on spreading nowadays science frontiers to the young generation of students and decided to ally with Peking iGEM from now on and help us accomplish the goal of "Sowing Tomorrow Synthetic Biologists".
Propagation for Lecture
In order to ensure our lecture to hold without impediment, Ms Zhou agreed to offer a hall for us. Furthermore, the teachers from all high schools in Beijing said that they were very glad to help inform their students to attend our lecture, and they even took all the propagation materials we prepared for the lecture, including the fliers and guiding brochure we made for students with interests.
Figure 6. Poster of our lecture "Life as machines --- Rational Design for Artificial Biological Systems".
Figure 5. In order to guide high school students to take part in the iGEM HS-Division competition, we organized all the related material and made a brochure for the competition. We gave the brochures to the students for propagation before and after our lectures.
Coming back from the club, we made a poster for our lecture. Then we sent each high school with several pieces of the poster and even put the electronic version on our website Peking iGEM on Renren to publicize our coming lectures.
