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This year's human practice of Tianjin iGEM team mainly focused on how to start a new iGEM team. Our 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. Our task can be divided into following parts.
iGEM Handbook
Figure 1. iGEM HandbookIn China, there are more than 1000 universities and colleges related with Life Science, Biotechnology and Bioengineering. However, compared with high participation of foreign countries, only several universities in China have a good command of skills of biological designing and experimenting. Moreover, many undergraduates have little access to learn about microbial designing and synthetic biology. To help more Chinese students get familiar with iGEM, we write an iGEM handbook with Chinese, a language used by about 1/3 of the world population. This helps freshmen without much researching experience to learn more about iGEM, and those universities which have never started an iGEM team to create a new idea. We hope that through our joint efforts, we can make further steps in the road of life science.
Our handbook is composed of 4 parts.
A background introduction of iGEM competition.
Specific experimental guidance. Here we pick out several well-known magazines. Through training, greenhands will be looking forward to laboratory life, and those with lab experience will have a great opportunity of improvement.
Summarization of the recent-year experience of several outstanding teams. By communicating, relationships between teams are strengthened. By learning from each other, more progress will be made in the field of synthetic biology.
Introduction to several iGEM gold-medal projects. By having a basic understanding of their projects, we can inspire young people to develop their imagination and create newer and better products.
Internet Platform
Figure 2. Internet PlatformOnline media such as Micro-blog, Renren and Douban was better utilized to expand the influence of our activities. These websites sponsored us this year to share with their website's audience some of the interesting things we were doing with genetics and synthetic biology this year. We had a great time writing about the humorous and sometimes stressful life of a student on an IGEM team. This was a great way to interface with industry and academia to convey a more humanistic view of synthetic biology.It also provided a great opportunity to connect with Chinese scientific community and industries.
Sina Blog sponsored us this year to share with their website's audience some of the interesting things we were doing with genetics and synthetic biology this year. We have authored a number of the blog posts and been featured in one of their writer's blog posts. This was a great way to interface with industry and show a more humanistic side of iGEM. We can offer diversified methods for you to get familiar with the IGEM. No matter whether you major in bio-technology or just have some interest in the synthetic biology. If like it, then JOIN US!
Our blog ：http://zhan.renren.com/tjuigem2013?from=unknown
60-Second Biology
Our human practice this year take the different backgrounds and needs of general public into consideration. We made full use of the Internet platform and tried our best to enlarge popularization of synthetic biology in China. To be more specific, we made videos to introduce iGEM and molecular biology which are limited in 60 seconds so that the message is efficiently sent to the audience, and draw the attention of the public. We also hope that through this activity, more and more Chinese people will take notice of the development of genetic engineering, an area that may change the future of the globe.
We translate some papers in biologic area to make sure our target population could get all the information efficiently in China. Besides, our team members recorded the audios of 60-Second Biology for promoting popular science. 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.
