Publicity through new-media

Except from educational outreach activities, the other thing we desire and hold to be valuable is to diversify groups involved in synthetic biology activities.

We hope to spread the culture and ideas of synthetic biology to the wider community and population. Therefore, we delivered the biology content to the public by regularly launching interesting protein-related science articles in the WeChat public Account. In addition, it is noteworthy that the professionalism of synthetic biology has always been an obvious barrier as it spreads. Therefore, we thought of incorporating some biological phenomena into the lyrics. This music propaganda, which abstracted the principles of synthetic biology, could hopefully allow a better understanding of complex synthetic biology knowledge and achieve a better science popularization effect. Our first biologically-themed song was called "Your Presence" based on the reunion of the two domains of hemoglobin.

WeChat Public Account

For the general public, we made a series of protein-popularizing science articles in our WeChat public account“Workingcells”. The original content came from the authoritative PDB101 science section. In accordance with the PDB101 citation rule and the permission of reprinting through email, 15 popular science articles were published from July 11 to October 23, and the total visits were more than 1.5K.

Community engagement

In the community around the school, we also tried to promote popular science within our scope. In October, we went to Shunjiang community to undertake various biological activities. Except from explaining how to observe cellular morphology under the microscope, we printed and gave probrick models to the children as gifts to sharpen their sense of domains. It was also wonderful to conduct a biology question and answer session with these lovely kids.

Probrick＆Brochure

Shunjiang activity

Biochemistry knowledge explanation

3D domain model display

Explanation of microscope usage

Kids are learning to use the microscope

Outreach activities for families

Science popularization should not be limited to the surrounding areas, we hope to popularize the knowledge of biology to a wider area. How to cover as many different groups as possible in the outreach activities is something we care about. After careful consideration, we decided to hold science popularization activities targeted at families rather than a specific group of people. In different families, parents tend to come from different fields and ages, and the joint participation of parents and children also helps to improve the effect of activities.

This year we held the third iGEM Day in Sichuan Science and Technology Museum on Oct.17th. Nearly 200 families participated in our protein building blocks exhibition, handicraft class, stage play and other activities we prepared. Participants from all over the country, ranging in age from 4 to 60, filled out our questionnaires after activities.

Attempt for special groups

In addition, we realize that some groups are more easily overlooked in biology science, such as people with hearing loss. Their understanding of the world is limited by their hearing, and even learning English is so difficult, let alone synthetic biology. Therefore, we translated our theme song "Your Presence" into sign language with help of UESTC Association of Sign Language. The final sign language video was posted to Bilibili website with UESTC official account and got 869 views in the first 10 hours posted. We also promoted the video on other social platforms. For people with hearing loss, we hope they could perceive biological knowledge. For hearing individuals, we hope they could go into biology, enhance attention to the sign language as well as biological interest through this art form.