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Team:Tianjin/Human Practice
From 2013.igem.org
This year's human practice of Tianjin iGEM team mainly focused on how to start a new iGEM team. We held five main activities this summer to attract more students to participate in the competition of IGEM. The number of the people who was directly influenced by us up to 2 000people. With the help of Internet media, more then 30 000 people start to cast a look on the synthetic biology and IGEM. We interfaced with industry and our sponsors through visiting biological company. Besides, to raise up biosafety problem the notice of the public, we organized the youths in the city through our E-sport Competition in collaboration with Plague Inc. Our task can be divided into following parts.
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New Teams Guidance
Figure 1. A new team in Nankai UniversityOur goal is to let more students who are interested in synthetic biology get familiar with iGEM, participate in it and join in our big family.In this part, we influenced high schools and universities related with biology in Tianjin. We shared our ideas with them by lectures, visits and interviews, and we successfully helped Nankai University start their first iGEM team.We aim to challenge this current predicament by introducing the emerging field of synthetic biology to high schools across the Tianjin City to spur curiosity towards the field and allow high school students to get involved in cutting-edge research opportunities.We helped more iGEM teams to grow with our joint efforts.We used a wide array of open panel discussions on campus to introduce other students to iGEM and synthetic biology, and the possibilities they hold as scientific pursuits.
IGEM Leading-in
Figure 2. iGEM leading-in The goal of the outreach part of our project was thus to interface with a variety of different audiences both within our city and outside it. We also wanted to do this in a more interesting and engaging way.To help more Chinese students get familiar with iGEM, we write an iGEM handbook with Chinese.We also created our network platform such as Renren (Chinese face book), Micro-blog, Douban, which have significant influence on the public. Our team members recorded the audios of 60-Second Biology for promoting popular science.We translate some papers in biologic area to make sure our target population could get all the information efficiently in China. Our team aims to make the public gain a strong knowledge of molecular biology lab techniques as well as a solid understanding of the IGEM competition.
Collaboration
Figure 3. Collaborate with four universities To help students of Engineering and Science learn from each other, we organized our iGEM team members to communicate with students from other teams. We worked with BIT 2013 iGEM team this summer on the development of both projects. And participated in the 1st Model IGEM, communicating with several universities including Peking, OUC-China and NJU-China and so on. In particular, we established deep friendship with TJU-IGEM. Both of sides appointed regular communication in the future IGEM team.We discussed our projects with others and listened to their advice, which enabled us to solve bioengineering problems from a different perspective.
Society Outreach
Figure 4.Society OutreachOur alk-sensor has innumerable applications. But what should we do to change the experiment into product and other commercial products? By contacting with Tianjin Institute of Industrial Biotechnology and Dagang Petrochemical Company, we start to take a fresh look at our project. We hope that under the instruction, who is respected in the field of Bio-energy, our experiments can be improved, and our products can have more applications in this field.We presented the details of our project to other scientists, in order to raise awareness of the field of synthetic biology and incite constructive discussions regarding the scientific specifications of our project.
