Team:Jiangnan/Silver
Overview
Jiangnan team communicated with the field leading scientists and other iGEM teams to seek their opinions on the significance of our project on solving some unresolved issues. We also participated in several communication events such as the 5th CCIC in Shanghai and 6th Asian-Pacific iGEM meet up in Taiwan, which were our precious memories.
CDC(Center of Disease Control)
and
Community Epidemic Prevention Station
in Wuxi (April 23rd)
According to the rules of the competition, we are not allowed to conduct experiments associated with human viruses, so we work on animal vaccines. As the principles on disease prevention are the same between animal and human vaccines, we disseminated human vaccine related knowledge to the public.
We did some market research in Center of Disease Control (CDC) and Community Epidemic Prevention Station (CEPS) in Wuxi, and found that there is a heavy demand on vaccines and large room for improvement on vaccine production efficiency. Also, we found that the public does not sufficient cognition on the importance of vaccination and lacks associated knowledge. We, thus, carried out a series of public educations and road shows to CDC and CEPS in Wuxi. Please see education and public engagement page for detailed information.
Invited
talk of experts
(June 11st to June 14st)
In order to deepen our understandings on the scientific significance of our project, we invited two world leading experts on plasma medicine from Australia to our university, discussed with them our problems in the lab and possible solutions, and interviewed them on the scope and prospects of our project from their point of view.
Rik Thompson, professor of Queensland University of Technology (QUT), is an expert working on plasma precision medicine. After an interactive discussion, Prof. Thompson has offered several insightful solutions to the problems we encountered in our experiments, given us some suggestions on modeling system optimization, and provided us with some technical guidance on the safety operation of plasma equipment in our lab. Prof. Thompson spoke highly of our ideas and our project. With his support and confirmation, we are more confident in ourselves and our project.
Katia Bazaka, an associate professor from QUT, is an expert on plasma chemistry. She has majored in several different subjects such as physical, biology, business etc. Her interdisciplinary background makes her an excellent candidate to be interviewed for this project which involves physics, bioinformatics, synthetic biology and art. She introduced us mechanistic principles of plasma on its medical use and shared us with her insights on plasma applications. After discussion with her, we all deeply believe that plasma is a promising tool to solve many medical problems in the future.
Besides, we shared our experience of taking part in iGEM, as well as our views on synthetic biology and interdisciplinary studies with these experts. On the last day, we went out for a barbecue and had a great fun together.
Meet ups
(In July and August)
We met up with several iGEM teams, exchanged project ideas, discussed problems encountered in the experiments as well as collaboration possibilities. Through these discussions, we got lots of suggestions on our experiments and human practice. Besides, we took part in the 5th CCIC in Shanghai and 6th Asia-Pacific iGEM meet up in Taiwan. As a team that for the first time participates in iGEM competition, taking part in these events is extremely useful as we could learn a lot from other teams. Also, it provides a great platform to find potential collaborators and make friends, which is really exciting and beneficial.
We also initiated several private meet ups with some iGEM teams , including XJTLU-China, NUS-Singapore-A and ZJU-China. We visited their labs, identified their problems and offered several suggestions to help them improve their projects. Also, they provided some pertinent suggestions to our project as well.
