Applet
At the beginning of 2018 SZU-China team, we had a brainstorming to decide our topic. We carried out three topics which were all close to daily lives and we didn’t know which to choose.
To strengthen the communication between iGEM and the public, we designed an applet named biocompany and post our ideas there. It’s a platform for the public to engage in the iGEM.
With the comments that people gave in Biocompany, we finally decided our project, cockroach terminator. For more details about our applet, please read our applet part.
Meetup
When we were designing our experiment, we still knew little about iGEM and many aspects of our project needed improved. We also wanted know what other teams were going on.
To gather suggestions and seek cooperation opportunities from each team, we held an iGEM South China Regional Conference. To take the essence from other teams, we also attended 5th CCIC and IGEM EURASIAN MEETUP.
We gained a lot from the meeting, we found our weak point, the safety problem and we made lots of collaboration through three meetings which made our project comprehensive.
Inverstigation
We had already designed our experiment, and designed an initial cockroach box. But we didn’t know whether it could work well in the environment.
Therefore, we first went to our canteen to make an inspection about the environment cockroaches stay most. We also went to CDC to get to know living habit of cockroach. Then we asked Dr. Wang from Chongqing University for more suggestions on our box design.
Considering three investigations and comments from the applet, we finally designed the second version of our cockroaches box which seemed more reasonable than the first one.
Simulation
Since we designed new box, and changed a new prescription, we were eager to know how it worked. Additionally, we heard that some methods of killing cockroaches may affect the neighbor. We also required some data for our modeling.
To achieve our goal, we made a simulation about consequent of killing cockroaches with different ways like cockroach chalks, and our box with wild spores. We calculated and compared the migration rate and mortality of each product.
Our modeling can ran smoothly with our simulation which provided lots of data for it. Analyzing the data, we can give a guidance to the public to choose a better way to kill cockroach.
Education and public engagement
Now our box has been tested and we had detailed data about different ways to kill cockroach. We wanted to make an attribution to the society and test our boxes at the same time.
Therefore, we use our applet to make lots of communication of the public. We post our simulation result and told them a better way to kill cockroach. A teacher invited us to give a popularization after watching our project. Moreover, we gave a post showing that we hoped to distribute our boxes and finally went to Hunan to help them kill the local cockroaches.
With this HP, we had a closer communication with the public online and offline. Besides, we found some disadvantages of our boxes used in reality, and we redesigned it again after villagers’ feedback.
Prospect
We have finished our experiment and cockroach box design named Green Ground finally.
We wanted to do more about our project, the iGEM, the public as well.
We are now applying for a patent for Green Ground, about to send our product to quality inspection to make in come true. More importantly, we want to use our applet to do more education and public engagement for iGEM and syntenic biology.
