Team:Hong Kong-CUHK/HP DIARY

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HUMAN PRACTICE - Diary

Educational activities were designed for high school students who may be offered the opportunity to join iGEM sooner or later. The program includes a talk, 2 surveys, and an optional workshop to be conducted at our laboratory facilities. We firstly introduced iGEM and synthetic biology and provide some information about microorganisms to avoid any misunderstanding

On June 27th, 4 team members visited a fellow iGEM team member’s high school alma mater, S.K.H. Lam Woo Memorial Secondary School, to give a talk to junior form Biology students. The presentation consisted of an introduction about iGEM, Synthetic Biology including the concept of BioBricks, and Hong Kong CUHK 2011 project, ChloriCoLight. We also presented past projects from the iGEM competition to illustrate the wide range of applications and benefits of Synthetic Biology, particularly in the environment and information processing. The aim of the talk was to provide students with a deeper understanding of this relatively new scientific field, arouse their interest in Synthetic Biology, and realize its potential in the future applications. We held a short Q&A session after the presentation, during which some students showed interest and raised questions regarding the safety issues of this scientific field. We then explained the necessary precautions we need to take to ensure the safety of Synthetic Biology projects.

On July 12, 16, and 18, we invited Grade 12 Science students from 2 high schools, Leung Shek Chee College and Immaculate Heart of Mary College to the CUHK campus to attend an in-house seminar on Synthetic Biology and laboratory workshop. The workshop was held at our Biomedical Engineering laboratory and had a total of 78 attendees, 28 on the first day, and 25 on the second and last days respectively. The students were divided into 6 to 7 groups, in their respective workshops, and assigned with an iGEM team demonstrator. Some members from last year’s iGEM team also served as demonstrators.

Before starting the workshop, we held a short talk about iGEM, Synthetic Biology and laboratory safety rules to ensure the safety of the participants. The first component of the workshop was a biosafety presentation accompanied by a demonstration on aseptic techniques. Through this, our team emphasized the precautionary measures necessary when working with microorganisms. The next component of the workshop comprised of experimental demonstrations of gel electrophoresis and spread-plate procedure to provide students with first-hand laboratory experience in order to develop a better understanding of the procedures and protocols taken in genetic engineering. After the workshop and talk, the students were taken on a tour of the CUHK Campus, particularly to our laboratory facilities.

During all four events, we took the opportunity to conduct surveys [make this a link] to evaluate how much senior high school students understood about Synthetic Biology, before and after the presentations.
“Dear diary, that’s it for this summer. :]”

Address: Rm. 184, Science Centre, CUHK
Email: kingchan@cuhk.edu.hk Tel: (852)-39434420 Fax: (852)-26037246