Team:SZU-China/Meetups

Unlike many other meetups that are always held after the competition, this year the 4th Southern China Regional Online Meeting, held by SZU-China, is to provide a platform for iGEM teams from all over China to learn from each other and establish collaborations before the competition. We hoped it can help more teams to dig out new ideas through the sparkle in the communications.

The meetup has been held offline three times before. This year, because of the Covid-19, it could only be held online. The Covid-19 does bring lots of difficulties, but holding the meet up online makes it possible to contact with a great wider range of iGEM teams from Mainland China without the limitations of distance. For this reason, we invited more iGEM teams nationwide this year.

The Meetup

Before the Meetup, we have posted the information on this China Mainland Meeting online. (Fig.1, Click here to see more).

Fig.1 Information on China Mainland Meeting online

Then, many requests were received from over 30 iGEM teams all around China.

Before the meeting, all teams need to upload a brief project introduction and a short video, making it easier to understand each project. The short video is also an early trial to fit the new requirement. (Click here to learn more!)

After all the projects were shown, a survey was launched to determine which projects participants were most interested in. Finally, 5 teams were chosen to give an integral presentation on the meetup.

On June 14, 2020, all the participants were invited to join the meeting on ZOOM. In the meeting, team BHSF, ZJU-China, XJTU-China, GreatBay_SZ delivered their presentation about their projects together with us.

Fig.2 GreatBay_SZ was presenting

Besides, 2020 iGEM Asian Ambassador Dorothy, Teacher Haoqian Zhang and Fankang Meng from Bluepha Co.Ltd. were invited as our special guests. In the meetup, they shared us with unique insights into Human Practice and team-building. Additionally, they gave valuable comments to each team on their projects.

Fig.3 iGEM Asian Ambassador Dorothy was presenting

Fig.4 Haoqian Zhang was presenting

Fig.5 The photo of the meetup

After the Meetup

In the meetup, our project deficiencies were noticed, and suggestions provided by participants greatly help us to improve our project. We also facilitated collaborations with those teams whose project is relevant.

What excited us most is all the teams participated were passionate about synthetic biology, which draws a brighter future in synthetic biology.

CCiC Meetup

On August 28 to 31, 2020, the 7th CCiC (The Seventh Conference of China iGEMer Community) which the theme is from LAB(laboratory) to FAB(fabrication) held online.

CCiC is currently the largest regional iGEMer meeting activity in the world. It is a non-profit academic exchange meeting initiated by iGEM students in China. It aims to build a platform for mutual learning for Chinese iGEMers. In the past few sessions, SZU-China has gained a lot of experience and cooperation opportunities from CCiC. And this year our team also benefited a lot from CCiC.

CCiC is like a rehearsal for Giant Jamboree and we carefully studied the strengths of the other teams. The judges also gave us some very useful advice. To our surprise, we won the Best Presentation and we were encouraged by this award.

During CCiC, we arranged different members to join different conferences and assigned them to record the presentations each team gave, looking for the teams that have something in common with our project so that we could corporate with them and have improvement together. After the CCiC, we finally build up the collaborations with the team Shanghai_SFLS_SPBS.

Fig.6 Group photo of 7th CCiC

Fig.7 List of awards

Friend Team Meetup

After CCiC，we also took part in the meetup held by SZPT-China. We gave a presentation and exchanged experience with other teams. We thanked SZPT-China for giving us this opportunity to show and share.