Team:NEU China A/Public Engagement

Engagement

Engagement





Education

1

In order to make the students know about college life and study, team NEU-CHINA-A connected with the Northeast Yucai High School in Liaoning Province to develop an event to introduce the synthetic biology, the iGEM competition and the process of scientific research to students.


After the speech and our experiments, some of the high school students asked us a number of questions. They only had a few minutes, but they were still able to come up with many great ideas.



2

We delivered a presentation about IBD, synthetic biology, iGEM competitions and our programs to more people. To the end, we made a three-fold booklet and poster. We not only distributed our reading materials in public places such as communities and libraries near the campus but also put our reading materials on the reading shelves in the hospital halls and beside the school medical room, hoping that more people can learn about IBD and synthetic biology.



Many residents were very interested in our project and stopped to listen. Some even stayed with us and inquired about further information.
We got a lot of encouragement while handing out brochures and display panels. At the same time, we also encountered problems and Suggestions from patients with related diseases. Some people even actively want to pay attention to our public platform and the popular science website we recommend. This gives us a great sense of accomplishment.



Survey

The literature shows that IBD is frequent in young, so we want to investigate young people's understanding of gut health and IBD. We produced relevant questionnaires and posted them on the social website, and ended up with 291 responses.
Our survey focused on the level of awareness and understanding of the population's gut disease. The data we obtained in the questionnaire are as follows:



The survey results show that the majority of people believe that only a few people pay attention to information related to intestinal diseases, and most people only pay attention to information related to problems or other special situations. Awareness of intestinal diseases and IBD is low in some developed regions.





Since the results above show that people still have little knowledge of intestinal diseases, there exist significance for us to do public science education.
Through the age statistics in the questionnaire, we found that the ratio of men to women was roughly balanced. Ages of respondents are mainly between 20 to 30 years old and 40 years old to 50 years old. In addition, the region and occupation of respondents are evenly distributed.



Game

PIBG(PROBIOTICS and INFLAMMATION BATTLEGROUD)



Based on our treatment plan for inflammatory bowel disease, our team designed a simple game. In the game, players play engineered bacteria that travel through the fire-filled gut, collecting nitric oxide emitted by inflammation and releasing the drug interleukin 10 to destroy the flame to help the gut recover. The upper right dial shows the health of the gut, the left is healthy and the right is critically ill. In difficult circumstances, our E. coli needs to fight not only IBD but also colorectal cancer.