SynBio Museum of China

Introduction

This is the battle field for us to erect our flags of SynBio populization and Public activities on large scale. Four platforms aiming at different crowds are developed. Their main contents are the same, while differs a little in some aspects. Followings are details about the SynBio Museum of China.

At the beginning of the “i” of iGEM, we opens the following forums:

• iPress: we release the latest information related to the newly discovered synthetic biology or life sciences.
• iKnowledge: this forum contains some fundamental knowledge about synthetic biology to help people who are stranger to this field to know more.

• iMap：we make a timeline of the form of synthetic biology on the picture. If you want to know what happened in the past and what will happen in the future of synthetic biology, come with us to enjoy the travel in the iMAP.
• iGEM, this forum will regard iGEM as the core. It includes project analysis, match point analysis and comprehensive reviews.
• iInterest: biochemical movie, biological game and so on.
• iCharity (pro-bono activities online part)：since transgenic technology applications is increasingly popular, we launch an activity called “seek for the safer future” to appeal the researchers to pay more attention to ensure the safety of transgenic technology. The activity contains two parts, the investigation and the signature activity.

Feedback from Web Site

Till the end of December 2011, the number of Chinese netizens reached 513 million, all kinds of the SNS social networks become the new darling of the Internet users, a single information channel is difficult for an emerging quickly accepted by the public, and this time we aim to build a multi-site propagation platform. We chose four sites: Douban which is famous for the book comments and online activities; another one is RENREN, and these two platforms receive high focus from Chinese young college students; Sina microblogging and Sina blog whose users are about 300 million.

The three aspects of the SynBio Museum is noteworthy. The first is the diversity of its content, we call it the library, but it provides the content much richer than the library, the combination of videos, images and texts makes the information more diversified, which meet the needs of different groups. The second is the interaction of the knowledge between the makers and browsers. We have received a lot of new ideas and improvement measures from the browsers. The chance of looking for more cooperation is possible. Our contact with the Nankai Middle School is benefit from our website. Inheritable game may temporarily come to an end but the construction of the site can be continued. TJU iGEMers are keen to share their synthetic biology knowledge on the website, it will continue to be substantial. Furthermore, we got some interesting views from the feedback of the browsers. Different platforms browsers will be interested in different focuses. For example, the main users of Renren are university students, so they care about scientific research and academic data while the Sina blog browsers who are mainly office workers, wonder about interesting news. Secondly, people get to know us through the propagation of their friends at an amazing speed. There is a saying that you can find the person you are looking for through other six persons you know. This effect is especially obvious in social network. Combining these two phenomena, we modify propaganda way continuously to let more people know the museum and learn more useful things.

Pro-bono Activities

The whole pro-bono activity is divided into two parts. The first is the popularization of knowledge, and the second is the interactive activities. We put knowledge about genetic pollution and transgenic technology on different platforms regularly for everyone to learn, and conducted a signature activity and made a questionnaire to attract more attentions in the interactive part. Finally, we tried to analyze the issue of genetic pollution through the results of the questionnaire.

Having received hundreds of signatures, we makes a hit in the Internet pro-bono activity. A netizen said that I never knew that transgene products had already walked into our life and it would have such enormous impact on our life. A little attention from everyone will become an invisible force eventually.

Plans for the Future

The popularization of scientific knowledge is not a short-term project and we will continue to build our “SynBio museum”. We are confident in our platforms from the feedback we have received. Then we will let new iGEMers learn the knowledge from our platforms in the next year. We also hope to attract more and more partners to work together for these platforms for popularization of synthetic biology in China.

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