This year, BGIC-Global and TU Delft took initiative to organize the first iGEM Eurasian Meetup for three days in for three days at Yantian Senior High School, China. Over 20 teams from as many as 6 countries/regions including China mainland, Hong Kong special administrative region, Taiwan, Germany, Switzerland, and Netherland attended the meeting. In order to make this meetup more successful and create a wonderful environment for other iGEM teams, we split the meetup into symposium, workshops, presentation and poster session.
Symposium
The meetup contained five speeches from different aspects of iGEM competition and synthetic biology. They were speakers from BGI company, researcher from TU Delft University, and even ambassadors and judges from iGEM competition.
Yue Shen & Ying Gu
The first speech which was given by Dr. Yue Shen and Dr. Ying Gu was titled as “Genome-write, eukaryotes and beyond. They were both from China national gene bank who offered us a great amount of information about the cutting-edge technology used to gene-editing and genetic synthesis.
Hong Chen
Dr. Hong Chen is this year IGEM Asian Ambassador. She gave a speech about after IGEM project. She gave us valued advice about how to continue to improve our project even after IGEM.
Dorothy Zhang & Franklin Nobrega
Ms. Dorothy Zhang and Dr. Franklin Nobrega were both IGEM ex-judges and instructors of their team BGIC-Global and TU Delft. They helped us clarify our thinking on our IGEM project and improve our project step by step, also giving us many precious suggestions about our IGEM project including poster, product, project presentation in the perspective of the judges of IGEM.
Hui Kang & Britte Bouchaut
The fourth speech which was about bioethics was jointly given by Mr. Hui Kang who is the External Officer and Acting Member of Institutional review board of BGI and Ir. Britte Bouchaut who is the PhD researcher in the “Biotechnology and Society’ group at TU-Delft university and also one of the instructors of TU-Delft IGEM team. Dr. Hui Kang uses the example of Chinese medicine to illustrate the meaning of bioethics vividly and Ir. Britte Bouchaut uses many real cases to help us understand the bioethical issues better and deeper.
Team Presentations
The 10-minute project presentations were given by 24 IGEM teams in two meeting rooms separately in two days. After each team’s presentation was finished, other team can ask any questions, and the instructors gave every teams specific suggestions after the presentations were finished. The questions helped us recognize the shortcomings of our projects so that we could lead our project toward a better direction.
Poster Session
The poster presentation provided us a chance to communicate with other teams more deeply and learn about other teams project. Many iGEMers from other teams provided us for many valuable suggestions which can help us to improve our project. It was a good experience for teams to practice explaining their projects so that we could be fully prepare for the Giant Jamboree.
Tea Breaks
During the breaks between each session, we provided snacks and drinks for iGEMers. Different teams shared their experience and projects with others.
Award Ceremony
On the last day, we held an award ceremony and gave out the best poster award, the best presentation award, the best pitch award, and the most engaged team.
