Science Communication
·Attending Conference of China iGEMer Community (CCiC)
On August 29th we attended the 7th CCiC. The process of CCiC was similar to iGEM Giant Jamboree. We wanted to experience team presentation and poster session in advanced. Due to the covid-19 epidemic, we had to attend the CCiC online. We recorded the presentation and made the poster beforehand. During the poster session, we viewed all the posters and found several projects that inspired us. For example, UCAS-China focus on stubborn stomach diseases caused by bacteria, and use synthetic biology methods to transform the probiotic Lactobacillus acidophilus to colonize the stomach while effectively curbing the growth of Helicobacter pylori. Their approach to make sure bacteria function normally is worth learning for us. Judges from CCiC committee gave comment to our presentation and experiment. They suggested us to check the concentration of serotonin and guaiacol to assure the degradation work normally and do some research on intensity environment of locust. After CCiC, the modeling part seemed to have large portion to be improved.
·Synthetic Biology Club
Synthetic Biology Club of SHSBNU was founded in 2016. Its goal is to spread basic knowledge about genetic engineering. With the instruction of teachers and former club members, synthetic biology club provides lots of resources for many students who are interested in synthetic biology.
Every Wednesday, we will get together. We taught the club members some basic skills such as bacterial inoculation, plasmid extraction, electrophoresis, construct simple genetic circuit. By using the skills, the newcomers made fluorescent painting by using various fluorescent protein, such as GFP, RFP and YFP. This activity arouses their interest of biology.
·Presentation to Club Members & Junior School Student
On September 22, we had a project presentation at SHSBNU. Zirui Wang carried out a general introduction of the project, including background information and inspiration. Next, Qingyu Liu introduced the core components and modeling part. Students listened very carefully and became very interested in our project and the subject of synthetic biology.
On October 7th, Heyang Jiao introduced our project to the junior high school students who came to visit Bluepha Lab. After the introduction, some of the students raised questions, such as how to make sure the E. coli get into the intestine of locust. This question reminded us to complete the whole process of our design, and considering how to release the engineered E. coli on the leaves of crop.
·Doing Social Research
In order to arouse public attention to the locust plague, we conducted a survey on the street, and many people filled in the questionnaires via QR Code. They were very interested in our project and discussed it with us. Most of them knew little about locust plague, so we made science popularization of locust plague to them. They were shocked to learn that locust plagues happened so fluently in this year.
·Feedback analysis
We got many useful data from those people. Then we did the feedback analysis of 7 questions respectively.
Among the respondents, 37.12% of them were over 40 years old. This group of people had more life experience, but the following results showed that they did not know much about locust and locust infestations. Locust plagues are quite common all over world. There are many areas where locust plagues are frequent. But they don't familiar with. So, this is necessary for us to do the public education.
At the same time, most people don't know much about synthetic biology, a subject has bright future.
Similarly, the public don’t know much about the locust plague, and most people (69.1%) had only heard about it from news. United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization says desert locusts can pose a threat to the livelihoods of 10% of the world's population. So people haven’t realized seriousness of locust plague.
We also had four questions are about the public's understanding of locust plague, such as the regions with high incidence of locust plagues, impact of locust plague, factors of forming locust plague and attitude toward existing prevention measures.
The respondents were familiar with the measures of locust plague. However, most people do not know much about the locust plague affected areas. People believe that there will be no locust plague in places with high humidity, but only in dry areas such as Inner Mongolia. But that's not the fact. Yunan is one of the examples. The respondents also underestimate the power of locust plague. Only the locust disaster area can experience the devastating power of locust plague.
·Official account
From the survey, we found that although people have some previous knowledge about locust plague, there is still long way to go. So, we posted many articles on the official account on WeChat. We have already got 2500+ views. They are interested in our project.Besides that, our promotion video has updated to Bilibili and already got 1197 views.
