UPDATE 09/24/2013

Overview

We all know that Yamanaka won the Nobel Prize in 2012 for his research on iPSCs. It is a milestone in the history of biology and medicine which opens up so much possibility. iPSCs are important in the research of stem cells and potentially have therapeutic uses, which can prevent the controversial use of embryos. However, there are potential risks about iPSCs applying in medicine, because the genes that were used to reprogram the somatic cells include oncogenes. The potential of oncogenicity is one of the problems that hindered the application of iPSCs in clinical applications. Thus, safety about application of iPSCs is our main concern. This year, we come up with a solution using synthetic biology methods to promote the application of iPSCs. Based on our project, we have done some outreach relating to iPSCs and human health.

It has been many years since the word ‘synthetic biology’ emerged, but we find that the concept of synthetic biology is still unfamiliar to the public. So we carried out four activities through out the year to spread the concept of synthetic biology, iGEM and iPSCs. These activities also allowed us to share our ideas with people who are already familiar with related knowledge.

As transgenic techniques have not been completely accepted by the public, the question about synthetic biology methods may be even tougher. People may be more concern about the biosafety of synthetic biology, because in synthetic biology methods we not only transform a single gene into the organism, but sometimes a completely artificial device. This kind of methods may also raise an ethical issue, because human beings create life just like the God.

With the concern about human health, we cooperated with Guangdong International Life Science Foundation, GDILSF. In order to share our opinions about human health and synthetic biology, we carried out a campus popularization, a TEDx Salon, and participate in a workshop for iGEM teams.

A Visit to the Hospital

There are some cases about using stem cells to cure disease in several countries, while the technique is not yet widely spread. What’s more, embryonic stem cells have controversy in its ethical rights and may have the risk of rejection. iPSCs, which are free of controversy and unlikely to cause rejection, may have a wider application than ESCs.

However, as iPSCs is a newly emerged technique, people who are not major in biology may know little about it. Thus, we decided to do a popularization about iPSCs in the hospital to let patients get to know the concept of iPSCs and its prospect of clinical applications. We also listen to their opinions about application of iPSCs and discuss this issue with them.

The hospital we went to is the Guangdong Provincial Hospital of Traditional Chinese Medicine. In the hospital, we told the patients and medicine workers the concept of iPSCs, and asked them whether they support relating techniques to apply in clinic. One of the nurses we interviewed supported the application of iPSCs. She believed that only with the application of this technique can we cure some incurable diseases. On the other hand, many people show the concern about the potential risks of the application of the iPSCs in clinic, which is mainly about its safety.

In this activity, we find that the public know little about iPSCs technology and we really need to do some popularization to let the commons understand what scientists are doing and why iPSCs can change this world.

Cooperation with GDILSF

Guangdong international life science foundation (GDILSF) , founded in 2011, is a nonprofit civil society organization, which support the Guangzhou institutes of biomedicine and health(GIBH )belonging to Chinese academy of science.

We cooperated with GDILSF in the following ways. We write several reports and articles about iPSCs or human health, which is ready to publish on a newspaer called Life Science. We are able to do some scientific research for them and use our knowledge about biology to help them evaluate the progress of some biotechnology companies.

On the other hand, we also get some help from GDILSF. They evaluate our project and give us important advice on safety and ethical concerns. They also provided foundation and technical assist to support our experiment. By the end of September we will have the chance to go to the institute and communicate the experience about culture of iPSCs with the researchers from GIBH.

It is our honor that the vice General Secretary Mr. Lin of the GDILSF visited us in our lab and talked about our project with us.He gave us some useful advice. We talked about our cooperation in long term and discussed the possibility of commercializing our iPSCs safe guard.

Campus popularization

At spring of 2013, SYSU-China iGEM team made a campus popularization targeting students from different majors.

In this activity, we presented the iGEM competition from many aspects. Our teammate, Fang Yiming, gave the audience an introduction to iGEM and shared some interesting projects in previous iGEM competitions. Our current team leader, Sun Mengyi, told us the origin, history, development and current situation of synthetic biology, and then discussed the safety and ethical issues about synthetic biology. We also invited the core members of former iGEM teams, Kou Qiang and Ye Chang, who talked about how iGEM team developed in our university and their own story with iGEM.

Thanks to such a cheerful meeting, we met many students who are interested in synthetic biology and iGEM and they are willing to join our team. We established a QQ group subsequently, and had more communication on it. Team members from current and former teams of iGEM-SYSU gathering together, which made it look like the jamboree for iGEM-SYSU. What an amazing evening!

TEDxSYSU

>What is TEDx?

TEDx was created in the spirit of TED's mission, "ideas worth spreading." The program is designed to give communities, organizations and individuals the opportunity to stimulate dialogue through TED-like experiences at the local level.

TEDxSYSU was authorize by TED, and has held many TEDx talks in the campus of Sun Yat-sen University. In order to spread the concept of synthetic biology and share some of our ideas, our wet lab team and SYSU software team decided to held a TEDx talk with the assistance of TEDxSYSU.

>Overview

This activity is not only a TEDxSYSU talk, but also a Salon about synthetic biology. It was held right before the start of the new semester in a comfortable meeting room, which can accommodate about 40 people. There were three speakers who gave 18 minutes talk respectively. We talked about synthetic biology and its safety concern. We also talk about non-coding RNA, which is a hot topic and important issue in biology. The audiences and the speakers shared their ideas about synthetic biology. Not only is it a good chance to spread the concepts of synthetic biology and iGEM, but also provided us a way to get to know what people think about synthetic biology and iGEM.

>More details

1.before the speakers gave the talks

We showed a TED speech from John Craig Venter in order to inspire the audience. Then we begin our TEDx activity. What the host said about synthetic biology made the audience lost in thought. She said: "Will synthetic biology be positive to the development of our society or will it be the Pandora box that we should not open?" With a question like that, we begin our interesting journey of exploring synthetic biology.

2. non-coding RNA will become an important tool

The first speaker Zheng Lingling is a lecturer of our university. She introduced knowledge of non-coding RNA to the audience. As we know, ncRNA is a hotspot in scientific research nowadays. People found that ncRNA play an important role in regulating gene expression. Because ncRNA is the regulator of a living system, we can use them to regulate the artificial system we designed. As the mechanism of ncRNA gradually revealed, the way of applying ncRNA in synthetic biology will become more diversified.

3. An introduction about synthetic biology

The second speaker is our team leader Sun Mengyi, who gave us an enthusiastic speech about molecular biology and synthetic biology. At the beginning of the speech, he talked about some interesting story in the history of molecular biology. After that, he gave a brief introduction about synthetic biology and showed some examples about it.

4. Computer network and synthetic biology

The third speaker is the team leader of SYSU-China-software, Miao Zong, who told us that biologists really need computer as their closest friend. As it’s known to all that we have already entered the ‘big data’ era. People can save much time and effort with computer dealing with so many data. He also introduced many interesting progress in computer science, which provide much convenient to biologists.

>Feed back

The audiences of this Salon are mainly students in our university. They show great interest about synthetic biology and iGEM after this Salon. We also shared our concern about the future prospect about iPSCs. After the Salon, we took a photo together and some of the audiences had some discussion with the three speakers privately.

Workshop in BGI in Shenzhen

This year we participate in a workshop held by BGI in Shenzhen. Several iGEM teams in Guangzhou and Shenzhen attended this workshop, including BGI, South University of Science and Technology of China (SUSTC), South China University of Technology (SCUT) and our university (Sun Yat-sen University, SYSU). Many teams have both software team and wetlab team, so there were actually seven teams who attended this workshop. In this workshop, each team presented their project that they were going to do in 2013 iGEM competition and share the experience and resources together.

After the meeting we had a cheerful dinner beside the beach.

This workshop also gave us a chance to get to know other iGEM teams and subsequently had some interaction with between SCUT team. We helped SCUT team to find out a mistake in their experiment method. We also gave technical suggestion about the synthesis of T7 promoter, and provided them a plasmid that contains ADH terminator to help them construct their circuit. We provided them hbax, which we have tested as workable part, as positive control in their experiment.