Team:Worldshaper-Shanghai/Collaborations
Collaborations
While we navigated our projects through the year, we faced lots of problems and difficulties that slowed down our pace, but none of them are capable of stopping us. We tried through new perspectives, seeking advices from others, but most important of all, we had collaborations with different iGEM teams that helps we achieve the common goals in the most efficient and productive way. We used our strengths to help other teams against their weaknesses, and other teams use their strength to overcome our difficulties.
Who did we collaborate:
1.ASTWS-China
2.Worldshaper-Nanjing
3.Hainan-China
4. OUC-China
5. KEYSTONE
How we collaborated:
We had collaboration projects including online meetup, problem-solving, and science communication.
1. Online meetups
Co-hosts：ASTWS-China, Worldshaper-Shanghai
Participants：Worldshaper-Nanjing, KEYSTONE, XH-China, Peking
While the coronavirus spreads through the world at an astonishing speed and restricting many days to day activities, we were forced to make lots of changes from our original plans, one of the biggest changes we made was that we moved the original meetups online. We planned an online meetup with the team ASTWS-China, the goal was to invite teams from different places with intriguing topics to share their own projects and seek advice from different teams and their instructors. While preparing for the presentation, our team had made a clear arrangement of works with team ASTWS-China. We were in charge of publicity of the meetup, revisions of the invitation letters, arranging the details on the sequence of meetup through PowerPoints, and most important of all, writing reflections and reports over the meetup. In order to attract and invite more teams into the meetup, we worked together with team ASTWS-China to make invitation letters and publicized it through social media including WeChat, successfully attracted teams through the internet.
During the meetup, a total of six teams participated along with five team instructors who specialized in different fields including material science, bio-engineering as well as cancer researches, yet the most important participants been the iGEM ambassador in Asia. During the meetup, each team had the opportunity to at first share their projects and receiving feedback and comments from different teams, their instructors, and the ambassador. Although teams presented their projects online, the intense atmosphere of the meetup has been an extremely valuable opportunity that mimics the actual presentation in Giant Jamboree, helping every participating team to experience what it is really like in the actual presentation. After the presentation made by each team, instructors, professors from different universities, pointed out some potential problems about the project in both experimental concern and practical operation. In the meantime, teams worked with each other to come up with solutions to problems they have faced. Each team had brought some excellent and revolutionary ideas that inspire other teams to refocus their projects. After the presentation, the iGEM Ambassador Jeff Hu hosted a workshop about risks and security in iGEM competition, and he also talked about problems regarding the changes in iGEM in response to the coronavirus, which answered lots of urging questions of current iGEM teams. An extremely important aspect of the ambassador’s workshop is how he warned us about the safety policies within the iGEM competition. Since we were doing an early diagnosis of prostate cancer through urine, we planned to conduct our experiment using actual urine samples from prostate cancer patients. However, the ambassador warned us that we were not supposed to be using any sample relating to humans without formal permission(which we didn’t plan about), or otherwise the projects contravene with the restriction policy of the competition. Ambassador’s warning has been really helpful to our projects as he warned us against the potential problems we might face in the early stage. It was only through his comments that we made a swift change to our experiment that prevented us from violating iGEM policies.
Figure1. Summer online meetup
2. Problem solving
2.1 Wiki problem solving
Partner：Hainan-China
While we were uploading our files to the iGEM official site to create our own wiki, we faced a problem that all plug-in, CSS, and JS files, failed to work on our wiki, and the website just appeared to be a whole bunch of mess. The texts appeared in total disorder as chunks of texts accumulate together without any structure or layout; images cannot be viewed; the entire wiki site just appeared as the source code when we initially wrote it. After we got stuck with our wiki problem, an interesting turning point occurred that saved our wiki. One of our teammates was surfing on the internet, she accidentally found a survey made by the iGEM Hainan-China, so she filled out the survey and got in touch with iGEM Hainan. After we showed them our problem, iGEM Hainan-China presented us with a solution and an instruction video. With their help, we successfully uploaded our plug-in and the wiki looked just perfect. At here we really appreciate all help from iGEM Hainan as they provided patient and professional guidance to us, and we wouldn’t have such a perfect wiki without their aid!
Figure2. Wiki problem solving
2.2 Project guidance
Partner：OUC-China
Our collaboration with OUC-China lays fundamentally on the wish to introduce toehold switch, this relatively novel technology, to more students, and hopefully can inspire them a new direction of approaching their scientific goals.
After the initial goal of digging deeper into the field of toehold switch is developed, our team searched over the team list of the latest three years provided on iGEM’s official website, seeking for teams that had worked on the same subject. Through extensive research, along with the assistance of our instructors, we reached in contact with OUC-China from the Ocean University of China, a 2020 iGEM team that also includes toehold switch as their primary approach.
OUC-China had a much mature experience with the toehold switch. At first, OUC-China planned to give us instructions on our design of the toehold switch. However, considering our initial goal and OUC-China’s impressive work in the science community, we ultimately reached the conclusion of collaborating on the popularization of toehold switch, composing an elaborate explanation of the theory, and a design guide.
Thanks to OUC-China, who provided us with explicit essays discussing toehold switch, we gained an even deeper understanding of this technology and were more confident in completing our manuscript. It was also planned that after our completion of drafts, OUC-China will also offer us some revision suggestions. Click Partnership Page for more details.
Figure 3.Discussing with OUC-China for help
3. Science communication
3.1 Science game
Partner: KEYSTONE
The KEYSTONE hosted a project about creating a game application that introduces basic biology ideas through scene play. The primary audience of the application is students in primary school and junior high. While in the collaboration, the KEYSTONE iGEM team provided us with the basic story background and main characters and left us to create our own storyline. In order to present our story with our own unique characteristic, we decided to write about the Toehold switch and introduce the general structure and function of this biological part. Within the collaboration, KEYSTONE provided some guidance for us on how to make an application, while we wrote our own story, draw our story in a scene play, and built it into the application. After we are finished with our part, we submit our part to KEYSTONE to integrate into the larger part.
Figure4. Science game planning and production
3.2 Technology exhibition
Partners：ASTWS-China、Worldshaper-Nanjing
On August twenty-thirds, we were luckily invited to the opening ceremony of Hangzhou Science and Technology Activity Week and hold a technology exhibition along with two other iGEM teams, ASTWS-China and Worldshaper-Nanjing. While in the exhibition center, each team had the chance to publicize their own research topics toward the public, many of whom incorporated little fun games, pamphlets, posters, and rollup banners in their presentation. While we were preparing for the presentation, team Worldshaper-Nanjing provided the source for the design and printing of posters, roll-up banners as well as pamphlets. Before the presentation starts, we helped the other two teams to set up the posters, preparing the roll-up banners and other necessity of the presentation to get ready. During the presentation, we worked together to present and demonstrate iGEM competition and synthetic biology to the public through posters and three different kinds of little games from different teams. While the adults are attracted by the presentation, kids are attracted by the game designed explicitly for them. For example, we drew a scene play that talks about the story of a student accidentally dropped into the micro world of a cell, and he is expected to overcome all challenges with his biology knowledge. Through playing the game, kids learn about toehold switch and other relevant ideas regarding our project, which has been extremely beneficial to publicize our projects to the public. Overall, it has been an extraordinary experience for all of us who participated, because we were able to train our organization and coordination skills. Furthermore, we successfully get more people filling our survey and subscribed to our social media channel, it was an excellent opportunity to propagate our project.
Figure 5. Hangzhou technology exhibition
3.3 Online seminar
Partners：Worldshaper-Shanghai，ASTWS-China，Hainan-China
After conducting the experiment in August, we were planning to host a seminar with the biology club of Shanghai World Foreign Language Academy, one of the most well-known schools that our teammates attended, to present and share our projects toward the public. While by chance that we discovered that team ASTWS-China are also looking for opportunities to share and present their projects toward the public, so we communicated with ASTWS-China and decided to invite them as a cooperator to organize an online seminar that presents our projects and share some of our ideas regarding the participation of iGEM competition. The seminar was divided into two parts where we host the first seminar on the first weekend of September while ASTWS-China will host the second seminar a week later. Because of the limitations set by Coronavirus, we decided to host the seminar through an online application that people from different cities can participate at the same time. In the seminar, our team shared our project based on both demonstration of our project as well as some of the feelings that we wanted to share. We introduced to students how widespread prostate cancer occurs, the growing urgency of developing new ways of diagnosis, and we also talked about the mechanism of our project, including our unique way of identifying the two highly specific molecules of prostate cancer and the design of toehold switch. ASTWS-China primarily demonstrated some amazing techniques in the mechanism of bio-engineering, which greatly inspired the students of the biology club. Through the online seminar, both ASTWS-China and we had the chance to educate the public on the urgency of issues that we have been trying to solve and also receiving some feedbacks through the seminar. It has been a really valuable opportunity and we all really appreciate it.
As time went on, we gradually developed the idea to invite more teams to present their projects for the students of biology class who are interested in participating in the competition in the future. We then communicated with team Hainan-China, the team that helped us solve our wiki problem, to participate in our ongoing seminars and demonstrate their project. Hainan-China introduced us to the topic of the ongoing problem of coral bleaching due to global warming, and they offered their solution through reestablishing the system of zooxanthellae endosymbiosis. The inspiring presentation first time ever attracted the attention of some of us on the actual influence of global warming. It raised public awareness on the urgency while in the meantime also explained the mechanism of their solution—the boost and reinforcement on symbiosis through altering some major characteristics of zooxanthellae.
Figure6. The screen cut of online seminar
How we collaborated:
We had collaboration projects including online meetup, problem-solving, and science communication.
1. Online meetups
Co-hosts：ASTWS-China, Worldshaper-Shanghai
Participants：Worldshaper-Nanjing, KEYSTONE, XH-China, Peking
While the coronavirus spreads through the world at an astonishing speed and restricting many days to day activities, we were forced to make lots of changes from our original plans, one of the biggest changes we made was that we moved the original meetups online. We planned an online meetup with the team ASTWS-China, the goal was to invite teams from different places with intriguing topics to share their own projects and seek advice from different teams and their instructors. While preparing for the presentation, our team had made a clear arrangement of works with team ASTWS-China. We were in charge of publicity of the meetup, revisions of the invitation letters, arranging the details on the sequence of meetup through PowerPoints, and most important of all, writing reflections and reports over the meetup. In order to attract and invite more teams into the meetup, we worked together with team ASTWS-China to make invitation letters and publicized it through social media including WeChat, successfully attracted teams through the internet.
During the meetup, a total of six teams participated along with five team instructors who specialized in different fields including material science, bio-engineering as well as cancer researches, yet the most important participants been the iGEM ambassador in Asia. During the meetup, each team had the opportunity to at first share their projects and receiving feedback and comments from different teams, their instructors, and the ambassador. Although teams presented their projects online, the intense atmosphere of the meetup has been an extremely valuable opportunity that mimics the actual presentation in Giant Jamboree, helping every participating team to experience what it is really like in the actual presentation. After the presentation made by each team, instructors, professors from different universities, pointed out some potential problems about the project in both experimental concern and practical operation. In the meantime, teams worked with each other to come up with solutions to problems they have faced. Each team had brought some excellent and revolutionary ideas that inspire other teams to refocus their projects. After the presentation, the iGEM Ambassador Jeff Hu hosted a workshop about risks and security in iGEM competition, and he also talked about problems regarding the changes in iGEM in response to the coronavirus, which answered lots of urging questions of current iGEM teams. An extremely important aspect of the ambassador’s workshop is how he warned us about the safety policies within the iGEM competition. Since we were doing an early diagnosis of prostate cancer through urine, we planned to conduct our experiment using actual urine samples from prostate cancer patients. However, the ambassador warned us that we were not supposed to be using any sample relating to humans without formal permission(which we didn’t plan about), or otherwise the projects contravene with the restriction policy of the competition. Ambassador’s warning has been really helpful to our projects as he warned us against the potential problems we might face in the early stage. It was only through his comments that we made a swift change to our experiment that prevented us from violating iGEM policies.
Figure1. Summer online meetup
2. Problem solving
2.1 Wiki problem solving
Partner：Hainan-China
While we were uploading our files to the iGEM official site to create our own wiki, we faced a problem that all plug-in, CSS, and JS files, failed to work on our wiki, and the website just appeared to be a whole bunch of mess. The texts appeared in total disorder as chunks of texts accumulate together without any structure or layout; images cannot be viewed; the entire wiki site just appeared as the source code when we initially wrote it. After we got stuck with our wiki problem, an interesting turning point occurred that saved our wiki. One of our teammates was surfing on the internet, she accidentally found a survey made by the iGEM Hainan-China, so she filled out the survey and got in touch with iGEM Hainan. After we showed them our problem, iGEM Hainan-China presented us with a solution and an instruction video. With their help, we successfully uploaded our plug-in and the wiki looked just perfect. At here we really appreciate all help from iGEM Hainan as they provided patient and professional guidance to us, and we wouldn’t have such a perfect wiki without their aid!
Figure2. Wiki problem solving
2.2 Project guidance
Partner：OUC-China
Our collaboration with OUC-China lays fundamentally on the wish to introduce toehold switch, this relatively novel technology, to more students, and hopefully can inspire them a new direction of approaching their scientific goals.
After the initial goal of digging deeper into the field of toehold switch is developed, our team searched over the team list of the latest three years provided on iGEM’s official website, seeking for teams that had worked on the same subject. Through extensive research, along with the assistance of our instructors, we reached in contact with OUC-China from the Ocean University of China, a 2020 iGEM team that also includes toehold switch as their primary approach.
OUC-China had a much mature experience with the toehold switch. At first, OUC-China planned to give us instructions on our design of the toehold switch. However, considering our initial goal and OUC-China’s impressive work in the science community, we ultimately reached the conclusion of collaborating on the popularization of toehold switch, composing an elaborate explanation of the theory, and a design guide.
Thanks to OUC-China, who provided us with explicit essays discussing toehold switch, we gained an even deeper understanding of this technology and were more confident in completing our manuscript. It was also planned that after our completion of drafts, OUC-China will also offer us some revision suggestions. Click Partnership Page for more details.
Figure 3.Discussing with OUC-China for help
3. Science communication
3.1 Science game
Partner: KEYSTONE
The KEYSTONE hosted a project about creating a game application that introduces basic biology ideas through scene play. The primary audience of the application is students in primary school and junior high. While in the collaboration, the KEYSTONE iGEM team provided us with the basic story background and main characters and left us to create our own storyline. In order to present our story with our own unique characteristic, we decided to write about the Toehold switch and introduce the general structure and function of this biological part. Within the collaboration, KEYSTONE provided some guidance for us on how to make an application, while we wrote our own story, draw our story in a scene play, and built it into the application. After we are finished with our part, we submit our part to KEYSTONE to integrate into the larger part.
Figure4. Science game planning and production
3.2 Technology exhibition
Partners：ASTWS-China、Worldshaper-Nanjing
On August twenty-thirds, we were luckily invited to the opening ceremony of Hangzhou Science and Technology Activity Week and hold a technology exhibition along with two other iGEM teams, ASTWS-China and Worldshaper-Nanjing. While in the exhibition center, each team had the chance to publicize their own research topics toward the public, many of whom incorporated little fun games, pamphlets, posters, and rollup banners in their presentation. While we were preparing for the presentation, team Worldshaper-Nanjing provided the source for the design and printing of posters, roll-up banners as well as pamphlets. Before the presentation starts, we helped the other two teams to set up the posters, preparing the roll-up banners and other necessity of the presentation to get ready. During the presentation, we worked together to present and demonstrate iGEM competition and synthetic biology to the public through posters and three different kinds of little games from different teams. While the adults are attracted by the presentation, kids are attracted by the game designed explicitly for them. For example, we drew a scene play that talks about the story of a student accidentally dropped into the micro world of a cell, and he is expected to overcome all challenges with his biology knowledge. Through playing the game, kids learn about toehold switch and other relevant ideas regarding our project, which has been extremely beneficial to publicize our projects to the public. Overall, it has been an extraordinary experience for all of us who participated, because we were able to train our organization and coordination skills. Furthermore, we successfully get more people filling our survey and subscribed to our social media channel, it was an excellent opportunity to propagate our project.
Figure 5. Hangzhou technology exhibition
3.3 Online seminar
Partners：Worldshaper-Shanghai，ASTWS-China，Hainan-China
After conducting the experiment in August, we were planning to host a seminar with the biology club of Shanghai World Foreign Language Academy, one of the most well-known schools that our teammates attended, to present and share our projects toward the public. While by chance that we discovered that team ASTWS-China are also looking for opportunities to share and present their projects toward the public, so we communicated with ASTWS-China and decided to invite them as a cooperator to organize an online seminar that presents our projects and share some of our ideas regarding the participation of iGEM competition. The seminar was divided into two parts where we host the first seminar on the first weekend of September while ASTWS-China will host the second seminar a week later. Because of the limitations set by Coronavirus, we decided to host the seminar through an online application that people from different cities can participate at the same time. In the seminar, our team shared our project based on both demonstration of our project as well as some of the feelings that we wanted to share. We introduced to students how widespread prostate cancer occurs, the growing urgency of developing new ways of diagnosis, and we also talked about the mechanism of our project, including our unique way of identifying the two highly specific molecules of prostate cancer and the design of toehold switch. ASTWS-China primarily demonstrated some amazing techniques in the mechanism of bio-engineering, which greatly inspired the students of the biology club. Through the online seminar, both ASTWS-China and we had the chance to educate the public on the urgency of issues that we have been trying to solve and also receiving some feedbacks through the seminar. It has been a really valuable opportunity and we all really appreciate it.
As time went on, we gradually developed the idea to invite more teams to present their projects for the students of biology class who are interested in participating in the competition in the future. We then communicated with team Hainan-China, the team that helped us solve our wiki problem, to participate in our ongoing seminars and demonstrate their project. Hainan-China introduced us to the topic of the ongoing problem of coral bleaching due to global warming, and they offered their solution through reestablishing the system of zooxanthellae endosymbiosis. The inspiring presentation first time ever attracted the attention of some of us on the actual influence of global warming. It raised public awareness on the urgency while in the meantime also explained the mechanism of their solution—the boost and reinforcement on symbiosis through altering some major characteristics of zooxanthellae.
Figure6. The screen cut of online seminar
We had collaboration projects including online meetup, problem-solving, and science communication.
1. Online meetups
Co-hosts：ASTWS-China, Worldshaper-Shanghai
Participants：Worldshaper-Nanjing, KEYSTONE, XH-China, Peking
While the coronavirus spreads through the world at an astonishing speed and restricting many days to day activities, we were forced to make lots of changes from our original plans, one of the biggest changes we made was that we moved the original meetups online. We planned an online meetup with the team ASTWS-China, the goal was to invite teams from different places with intriguing topics to share their own projects and seek advice from different teams and their instructors. While preparing for the presentation, our team had made a clear arrangement of works with team ASTWS-China. We were in charge of publicity of the meetup, revisions of the invitation letters, arranging the details on the sequence of meetup through PowerPoints, and most important of all, writing reflections and reports over the meetup. In order to attract and invite more teams into the meetup, we worked together with team ASTWS-China to make invitation letters and publicized it through social media including WeChat, successfully attracted teams through the internet.
During the meetup, a total of six teams participated along with five team instructors who specialized in different fields including material science, bio-engineering as well as cancer researches, yet the most important participants been the iGEM ambassador in Asia. During the meetup, each team had the opportunity to at first share their projects and receiving feedback and comments from different teams, their instructors, and the ambassador. Although teams presented their projects online, the intense atmosphere of the meetup has been an extremely valuable opportunity that mimics the actual presentation in Giant Jamboree, helping every participating team to experience what it is really like in the actual presentation. After the presentation made by each team, instructors, professors from different universities, pointed out some potential problems about the project in both experimental concern and practical operation. In the meantime, teams worked with each other to come up with solutions to problems they have faced. Each team had brought some excellent and revolutionary ideas that inspire other teams to refocus their projects. After the presentation, the iGEM Ambassador Jeff Hu hosted a workshop about risks and security in iGEM competition, and he also talked about problems regarding the changes in iGEM in response to the coronavirus, which answered lots of urging questions of current iGEM teams. An extremely important aspect of the ambassador’s workshop is how he warned us about the safety policies within the iGEM competition. Since we were doing an early diagnosis of prostate cancer through urine, we planned to conduct our experiment using actual urine samples from prostate cancer patients. However, the ambassador warned us that we were not supposed to be using any sample relating to humans without formal permission(which we didn’t plan about), or otherwise the projects contravene with the restriction policy of the competition. Ambassador’s warning has been really helpful to our projects as he warned us against the potential problems we might face in the early stage. It was only through his comments that we made a swift change to our experiment that prevented us from violating iGEM policies.
Figure1. Summer online meetup
2. Problem solving
2.1 Wiki problem solving
Partner：Hainan-China
While we were uploading our files to the iGEM official site to create our own wiki, we faced a problem that all plug-in, CSS, and JS files, failed to work on our wiki, and the website just appeared to be a whole bunch of mess. The texts appeared in total disorder as chunks of texts accumulate together without any structure or layout; images cannot be viewed; the entire wiki site just appeared as the source code when we initially wrote it. After we got stuck with our wiki problem, an interesting turning point occurred that saved our wiki. One of our teammates was surfing on the internet, she accidentally found a survey made by the iGEM Hainan-China, so she filled out the survey and got in touch with iGEM Hainan. After we showed them our problem, iGEM Hainan-China presented us with a solution and an instruction video. With their help, we successfully uploaded our plug-in and the wiki looked just perfect. At here we really appreciate all help from iGEM Hainan as they provided patient and professional guidance to us, and we wouldn’t have such a perfect wiki without their aid!
Figure2. Wiki problem solving
2.2 Project guidance
Partner：OUC-China
Our collaboration with OUC-China lays fundamentally on the wish to introduce toehold switch, this relatively novel technology, to more students, and hopefully can inspire them a new direction of approaching their scientific goals.
After the initial goal of digging deeper into the field of toehold switch is developed, our team searched over the team list of the latest three years provided on iGEM’s official website, seeking for teams that had worked on the same subject. Through extensive research, along with the assistance of our instructors, we reached in contact with OUC-China from the Ocean University of China, a 2020 iGEM team that also includes toehold switch as their primary approach.
OUC-China had a much mature experience with the toehold switch. At first, OUC-China planned to give us instructions on our design of the toehold switch. However, considering our initial goal and OUC-China’s impressive work in the science community, we ultimately reached the conclusion of collaborating on the popularization of toehold switch, composing an elaborate explanation of the theory, and a design guide.
Thanks to OUC-China, who provided us with explicit essays discussing toehold switch, we gained an even deeper understanding of this technology and were more confident in completing our manuscript. It was also planned that after our completion of drafts, OUC-China will also offer us some revision suggestions. Click Partnership Page for more details.
Figure 3.Discussing with OUC-China for help
3. Science communication
3.1 Science game
Partner: KEYSTONE
The KEYSTONE hosted a project about creating a game application that introduces basic biology ideas through scene play. The primary audience of the application is students in primary school and junior high. While in the collaboration, the KEYSTONE iGEM team provided us with the basic story background and main characters and left us to create our own storyline. In order to present our story with our own unique characteristic, we decided to write about the Toehold switch and introduce the general structure and function of this biological part. Within the collaboration, KEYSTONE provided some guidance for us on how to make an application, while we wrote our own story, draw our story in a scene play, and built it into the application. After we are finished with our part, we submit our part to KEYSTONE to integrate into the larger part.
Figure4. Science game planning and production
3.2 Technology exhibition
Partners：ASTWS-China、Worldshaper-Nanjing
On August twenty-thirds, we were luckily invited to the opening ceremony of Hangzhou Science and Technology Activity Week and hold a technology exhibition along with two other iGEM teams, ASTWS-China and Worldshaper-Nanjing. While in the exhibition center, each team had the chance to publicize their own research topics toward the public, many of whom incorporated little fun games, pamphlets, posters, and rollup banners in their presentation. While we were preparing for the presentation, team Worldshaper-Nanjing provided the source for the design and printing of posters, roll-up banners as well as pamphlets. Before the presentation starts, we helped the other two teams to set up the posters, preparing the roll-up banners and other necessity of the presentation to get ready. During the presentation, we worked together to present and demonstrate iGEM competition and synthetic biology to the public through posters and three different kinds of little games from different teams. While the adults are attracted by the presentation, kids are attracted by the game designed explicitly for them. For example, we drew a scene play that talks about the story of a student accidentally dropped into the micro world of a cell, and he is expected to overcome all challenges with his biology knowledge. Through playing the game, kids learn about toehold switch and other relevant ideas regarding our project, which has been extremely beneficial to publicize our projects to the public. Overall, it has been an extraordinary experience for all of us who participated, because we were able to train our organization and coordination skills. Furthermore, we successfully get more people filling our survey and subscribed to our social media channel, it was an excellent opportunity to propagate our project.
Figure 5. Hangzhou technology exhibition
3.3 Online seminar
Partners：Worldshaper-Shanghai，ASTWS-China，Hainan-China
After conducting the experiment in August, we were planning to host a seminar with the biology club of Shanghai World Foreign Language Academy, one of the most well-known schools that our teammates attended, to present and share our projects toward the public. While by chance that we discovered that team ASTWS-China are also looking for opportunities to share and present their projects toward the public, so we communicated with ASTWS-China and decided to invite them as a cooperator to organize an online seminar that presents our projects and share some of our ideas regarding the participation of iGEM competition. The seminar was divided into two parts where we host the first seminar on the first weekend of September while ASTWS-China will host the second seminar a week later. Because of the limitations set by Coronavirus, we decided to host the seminar through an online application that people from different cities can participate at the same time. In the seminar, our team shared our project based on both demonstration of our project as well as some of the feelings that we wanted to share. We introduced to students how widespread prostate cancer occurs, the growing urgency of developing new ways of diagnosis, and we also talked about the mechanism of our project, including our unique way of identifying the two highly specific molecules of prostate cancer and the design of toehold switch. ASTWS-China primarily demonstrated some amazing techniques in the mechanism of bio-engineering, which greatly inspired the students of the biology club. Through the online seminar, both ASTWS-China and we had the chance to educate the public on the urgency of issues that we have been trying to solve and also receiving some feedbacks through the seminar. It has been a really valuable opportunity and we all really appreciate it.
As time went on, we gradually developed the idea to invite more teams to present their projects for the students of biology class who are interested in participating in the competition in the future. We then communicated with team Hainan-China, the team that helped us solve our wiki problem, to participate in our ongoing seminars and demonstrate their project. Hainan-China introduced us to the topic of the ongoing problem of coral bleaching due to global warming, and they offered their solution through reestablishing the system of zooxanthellae endosymbiosis. The inspiring presentation first time ever attracted the attention of some of us on the actual influence of global warming. It raised public awareness on the urgency while in the meantime also explained the mechanism of their solution—the boost and reinforcement on symbiosis through altering some major characteristics of zooxanthellae.
Figure6. The screen cut of online seminar
Figure1. Summer online meetup
2. Problem solving
2.1 Wiki problem solving
Partner：Hainan-China
While we were uploading our files to the iGEM official site to create our own wiki, we faced a problem that all plug-in, CSS, and JS files, failed to work on our wiki, and the website just appeared to be a whole bunch of mess. The texts appeared in total disorder as chunks of texts accumulate together without any structure or layout; images cannot be viewed; the entire wiki site just appeared as the source code when we initially wrote it. After we got stuck with our wiki problem, an interesting turning point occurred that saved our wiki. One of our teammates was surfing on the internet, she accidentally found a survey made by the iGEM Hainan-China, so she filled out the survey and got in touch with iGEM Hainan. After we showed them our problem, iGEM Hainan-China presented us with a solution and an instruction video. With their help, we successfully uploaded our plug-in and the wiki looked just perfect. At here we really appreciate all help from iGEM Hainan as they provided patient and professional guidance to us, and we wouldn’t have such a perfect wiki without their aid!
Figure2. Wiki problem solving
2.2 Project guidance
Partner：OUC-China
Our collaboration with OUC-China lays fundamentally on the wish to introduce toehold switch, this relatively novel technology, to more students, and hopefully can inspire them a new direction of approaching their scientific goals.
After the initial goal of digging deeper into the field of toehold switch is developed, our team searched over the team list of the latest three years provided on iGEM’s official website, seeking for teams that had worked on the same subject. Through extensive research, along with the assistance of our instructors, we reached in contact with OUC-China from the Ocean University of China, a 2020 iGEM team that also includes toehold switch as their primary approach.
OUC-China had a much mature experience with the toehold switch. At first, OUC-China planned to give us instructions on our design of the toehold switch. However, considering our initial goal and OUC-China’s impressive work in the science community, we ultimately reached the conclusion of collaborating on the popularization of toehold switch, composing an elaborate explanation of the theory, and a design guide.
Thanks to OUC-China, who provided us with explicit essays discussing toehold switch, we gained an even deeper understanding of this technology and were more confident in completing our manuscript. It was also planned that after our completion of drafts, OUC-China will also offer us some revision suggestions. Click Partnership Page for more details.
Figure 3.Discussing with OUC-China for help
3. Science communication
3.1 Science game
Partner: KEYSTONE
The KEYSTONE hosted a project about creating a game application that introduces basic biology ideas through scene play. The primary audience of the application is students in primary school and junior high. While in the collaboration, the KEYSTONE iGEM team provided us with the basic story background and main characters and left us to create our own storyline. In order to present our story with our own unique characteristic, we decided to write about the Toehold switch and introduce the general structure and function of this biological part. Within the collaboration, KEYSTONE provided some guidance for us on how to make an application, while we wrote our own story, draw our story in a scene play, and built it into the application. After we are finished with our part, we submit our part to KEYSTONE to integrate into the larger part.
Figure4. Science game planning and production
3.2 Technology exhibition
Partners：ASTWS-China、Worldshaper-Nanjing
On August twenty-thirds, we were luckily invited to the opening ceremony of Hangzhou Science and Technology Activity Week and hold a technology exhibition along with two other iGEM teams, ASTWS-China and Worldshaper-Nanjing. While in the exhibition center, each team had the chance to publicize their own research topics toward the public, many of whom incorporated little fun games, pamphlets, posters, and rollup banners in their presentation. While we were preparing for the presentation, team Worldshaper-Nanjing provided the source for the design and printing of posters, roll-up banners as well as pamphlets. Before the presentation starts, we helped the other two teams to set up the posters, preparing the roll-up banners and other necessity of the presentation to get ready. During the presentation, we worked together to present and demonstrate iGEM competition and synthetic biology to the public through posters and three different kinds of little games from different teams. While the adults are attracted by the presentation, kids are attracted by the game designed explicitly for them. For example, we drew a scene play that talks about the story of a student accidentally dropped into the micro world of a cell, and he is expected to overcome all challenges with his biology knowledge. Through playing the game, kids learn about toehold switch and other relevant ideas regarding our project, which has been extremely beneficial to publicize our projects to the public. Overall, it has been an extraordinary experience for all of us who participated, because we were able to train our organization and coordination skills. Furthermore, we successfully get more people filling our survey and subscribed to our social media channel, it was an excellent opportunity to propagate our project.
Figure 5. Hangzhou technology exhibition
3.3 Online seminar
Partners：Worldshaper-Shanghai，ASTWS-China，Hainan-China
After conducting the experiment in August, we were planning to host a seminar with the biology club of Shanghai World Foreign Language Academy, one of the most well-known schools that our teammates attended, to present and share our projects toward the public. While by chance that we discovered that team ASTWS-China are also looking for opportunities to share and present their projects toward the public, so we communicated with ASTWS-China and decided to invite them as a cooperator to organize an online seminar that presents our projects and share some of our ideas regarding the participation of iGEM competition. The seminar was divided into two parts where we host the first seminar on the first weekend of September while ASTWS-China will host the second seminar a week later. Because of the limitations set by Coronavirus, we decided to host the seminar through an online application that people from different cities can participate at the same time. In the seminar, our team shared our project based on both demonstration of our project as well as some of the feelings that we wanted to share. We introduced to students how widespread prostate cancer occurs, the growing urgency of developing new ways of diagnosis, and we also talked about the mechanism of our project, including our unique way of identifying the two highly specific molecules of prostate cancer and the design of toehold switch. ASTWS-China primarily demonstrated some amazing techniques in the mechanism of bio-engineering, which greatly inspired the students of the biology club. Through the online seminar, both ASTWS-China and we had the chance to educate the public on the urgency of issues that we have been trying to solve and also receiving some feedbacks through the seminar. It has been a really valuable opportunity and we all really appreciate it.
As time went on, we gradually developed the idea to invite more teams to present their projects for the students of biology class who are interested in participating in the competition in the future. We then communicated with team Hainan-China, the team that helped us solve our wiki problem, to participate in our ongoing seminars and demonstrate their project. Hainan-China introduced us to the topic of the ongoing problem of coral bleaching due to global warming, and they offered their solution through reestablishing the system of zooxanthellae endosymbiosis. The inspiring presentation first time ever attracted the attention of some of us on the actual influence of global warming. It raised public awareness on the urgency while in the meantime also explained the mechanism of their solution—the boost and reinforcement on symbiosis through altering some major characteristics of zooxanthellae.
Figure6. The screen cut of online seminar
3.2 Technology exhibition
Partners：ASTWS-China、Worldshaper-Nanjing
On August twenty-thirds, we were luckily invited to the opening ceremony of Hangzhou Science and Technology Activity Week and hold a technology exhibition along with two other iGEM teams, ASTWS-China and Worldshaper-Nanjing. While in the exhibition center, each team had the chance to publicize their own research topics toward the public, many of whom incorporated little fun games, pamphlets, posters, and rollup banners in their presentation. While we were preparing for the presentation, team Worldshaper-Nanjing provided the source for the design and printing of posters, roll-up banners as well as pamphlets. Before the presentation starts, we helped the other two teams to set up the posters, preparing the roll-up banners and other necessity of the presentation to get ready. During the presentation, we worked together to present and demonstrate iGEM competition and synthetic biology to the public through posters and three different kinds of little games from different teams. While the adults are attracted by the presentation, kids are attracted by the game designed explicitly for them. For example, we drew a scene play that talks about the story of a student accidentally dropped into the micro world of a cell, and he is expected to overcome all challenges with his biology knowledge. Through playing the game, kids learn about toehold switch and other relevant ideas regarding our project, which has been extremely beneficial to publicize our projects to the public. Overall, it has been an extraordinary experience for all of us who participated, because we were able to train our organization and coordination skills. Furthermore, we successfully get more people filling our survey and subscribed to our social media channel, it was an excellent opportunity to propagate our project.
Figure 5. Hangzhou technology exhibition
3.3 Online seminar
Partners：Worldshaper-Shanghai，ASTWS-China，Hainan-China
After conducting the experiment in August, we were planning to host a seminar with the biology club of Shanghai World Foreign Language Academy, one of the most well-known schools that our teammates attended, to present and share our projects toward the public. While by chance that we discovered that team ASTWS-China are also looking for opportunities to share and present their projects toward the public, so we communicated with ASTWS-China and decided to invite them as a cooperator to organize an online seminar that presents our projects and share some of our ideas regarding the participation of iGEM competition. The seminar was divided into two parts where we host the first seminar on the first weekend of September while ASTWS-China will host the second seminar a week later. Because of the limitations set by Coronavirus, we decided to host the seminar through an online application that people from different cities can participate at the same time. In the seminar, our team shared our project based on both demonstration of our project as well as some of the feelings that we wanted to share. We introduced to students how widespread prostate cancer occurs, the growing urgency of developing new ways of diagnosis, and we also talked about the mechanism of our project, including our unique way of identifying the two highly specific molecules of prostate cancer and the design of toehold switch. ASTWS-China primarily demonstrated some amazing techniques in the mechanism of bio-engineering, which greatly inspired the students of the biology club. Through the online seminar, both ASTWS-China and we had the chance to educate the public on the urgency of issues that we have been trying to solve and also receiving some feedbacks through the seminar. It has been a really valuable opportunity and we all really appreciate it.
As time went on, we gradually developed the idea to invite more teams to present their projects for the students of biology class who are interested in participating in the competition in the future. We then communicated with team Hainan-China, the team that helped us solve our wiki problem, to participate in our ongoing seminars and demonstrate their project. Hainan-China introduced us to the topic of the ongoing problem of coral bleaching due to global warming, and they offered their solution through reestablishing the system of zooxanthellae endosymbiosis. The inspiring presentation first time ever attracted the attention of some of us on the actual influence of global warming. It raised public awareness on the urgency while in the meantime also explained the mechanism of their solution—the boost and reinforcement on symbiosis through altering some major characteristics of zooxanthellae.
Figure6. The screen cut of online seminar
Partners：Worldshaper-Shanghai，ASTWS-China，Hainan-China
After conducting the experiment in August, we were planning to host a seminar with the biology club of Shanghai World Foreign Language Academy, one of the most well-known schools that our teammates attended, to present and share our projects toward the public. While by chance that we discovered that team ASTWS-China are also looking for opportunities to share and present their projects toward the public, so we communicated with ASTWS-China and decided to invite them as a cooperator to organize an online seminar that presents our projects and share some of our ideas regarding the participation of iGEM competition. The seminar was divided into two parts where we host the first seminar on the first weekend of September while ASTWS-China will host the second seminar a week later. Because of the limitations set by Coronavirus, we decided to host the seminar through an online application that people from different cities can participate at the same time. In the seminar, our team shared our project based on both demonstration of our project as well as some of the feelings that we wanted to share. We introduced to students how widespread prostate cancer occurs, the growing urgency of developing new ways of diagnosis, and we also talked about the mechanism of our project, including our unique way of identifying the two highly specific molecules of prostate cancer and the design of toehold switch. ASTWS-China primarily demonstrated some amazing techniques in the mechanism of bio-engineering, which greatly inspired the students of the biology club. Through the online seminar, both ASTWS-China and we had the chance to educate the public on the urgency of issues that we have been trying to solve and also receiving some feedbacks through the seminar. It has been a really valuable opportunity and we all really appreciate it.
As time went on, we gradually developed the idea to invite more teams to present their projects for the students of biology class who are interested in participating in the competition in the future. We then communicated with team Hainan-China, the team that helped us solve our wiki problem, to participate in our ongoing seminars and demonstrate their project. Hainan-China introduced us to the topic of the ongoing problem of coral bleaching due to global warming, and they offered their solution through reestablishing the system of zooxanthellae endosymbiosis. The inspiring presentation first time ever attracted the attention of some of us on the actual influence of global warming. It raised public awareness on the urgency while in the meantime also explained the mechanism of their solution—the boost and reinforcement on symbiosis through altering some major characteristics of zooxanthellae.