Team:SYSU-Software/Education
Science communicaiton
Recently, we noticed the problem that although students majoring in biology in China have been required to learn the basic principles of genetic engineering for years, synthetic biology, a more up to date and promising research field, is rather ignored. The textbooks and teaching guidelines are mainly widely accepted and verified knowledge, so cutting-edge achievements in synthetic biology is seldom taught in class. At the same time, however, after chatting with many college freshmen, we were surprised to find that many students are ready to learn more about synthetic biology, and they are likely to be interested in iGEM -- only if they had heard about it before.
These arisen questions echo in our heads: What can we do about this? Can we hold a lecture on synthetic biology and iGEM, to explain what synthetic biology is, why is it so important, and what iGEMers had done to create a brighter future?
All these questions are answered when we finally decided to gave a lecture on the topic “Synthetic Future: when Synthetic Biology meets Bioinformatics” for college freshmen and sophomores. At first, we were thinking about giving this lecture to high school students, and holding a “Synthetic Biology Day”. But due to the pandemic, these plans were abandoned. Then we realized that a lecture for college freshmen best meets our needs, for, firstly, since it is not accessible to the public, the risk of clustering COVID-19 infection is under control; secondly, the meeting room is really a perfect place to exchange ideas and have discussions with each others; thirdly, after all, it is not too late to start learning synthetic biology and bioinformatics in the first year in college. We decided that we only need to give basic concepts to our audience, and though the free-discussion part, they will understand them.
We described two imaginary scenes: one day, the medicine that target your need can be produced in home quickly and safely; the organism that can intake specific poisonous matter can be produced in hours or even minutes in factories. Synthetic Biology and Bioinformatics may make these two scenes come true one day.
Then, we briefly introduced the basic concepts and applications of synthetic biology and bioinformatics to our audiences. What differ synthetic biology from genetic engineering? What do the fundamental principles of synthetic biology -- standardization and engineering -- means? What are the basic components used in synthetic biology design? How to “build a life”? Why do we combine synthetic biology with bioinformatics and how to do this? We talked about our understanding of these questions.
In the end, we talked about a prestigious competition in the field of Synthetic Biology -- iGEM. We talked about our enthusiasm, our determination, our wills to create something for the world, and, our goal to “make synbiology a splendid melody”.
During the whole process, many of our audience participated in the free discussion process proactively. They exchanged ideas with each other and with us. Many of them told us that they really enjoyed the whole process and learned a lot -- and so do we. Some of the questions they asked were insightful and forced us to think deeply. We also talked a lot about campus life and the future. We were glad that some of our audience said they realized how interest synthetic biology was, and were willing to join iGEM community.
