Team member selection

Every year after the giant jamboree or the regional final, the teams that had participated would then take the role of selecting qualified students to assemble the next year’s team. Due to the not-so-high cognition level of iGEM to Chinese high school students (first undergraduates), last year’s teams hosted an event to promote recognition of synthetic biology and the competition (on December 15th, 2017).

For the selection, a brief introduction of synthetic biology and iGEM was issued online through WeChat, and anyone interested in the competition could fill out an online form to apply. The primary purpose of the form was to testify the applicants’ enthusiasm and understanding on synthetic biology in case they establish an irrelevant project or give up mid-way. Upon collection of the application forms, previous team leaders sifted through the numerous forms and selected out the most earnest and qualified ones. The persons that have been selected out would face another round of interview to determine if their text were real.

In this way, it was made sure that the members selected had enough enthusiasm to participate, as well as basic understandings on synthetic biology and iGEM to establish a sound project.

Winter-break training

The winter-break training is our reserved program for every year’s competition. Members with specialties that haven’t taken part in the training may be added into a team later if needed, but the core members of a team always come from the winter-break training. During the 14-day training, possible participants that have passed the previous selection would come together, to brainstorm and discuss their ideas in hopes of bringing forward projects that are both realizable and novel. During this process, members from the previous year’s teams had come and organized multiple workshops on various things like basic experimental methods, widely-used tools in synthetic biology, recent iGEM winners and so on.

Theory training

Theory training lasted for nine days. During this time, members from previous teams selflessly devoted their time and effort in helping us, who knew almost nothing about synthetic biology at that time, to have a full grasp on it. Before the training started, participants were instructed to study molecular biology through online videos and a test was taken to examine our efforts. It signifies the beginning of a tiring but fruitful period.

In the 9-day training, we were introduced to things including but not limited to biological circuits and recombinases, cellular immunology, transcription initiation and termination, logic gates, DNA assembling methods, quorum sensing… It had been the most hard-working and fulfilling time most of us had since entering college. Last year’s members generously imparted their knowledge, experience and competition insights with us. Moreover, in this way, helped us to transform from being ignorant and hesitating to targeted and clear-minded future team leaders/members.

Knowledge only constituted a part of their generous giving. They also helped us in learning how to find researches conducted in our fields of interest, how to quickly have an overall grasp of research literature, the essential constituents of an iGEM project and how to present it through the wiki. They introduced the iBiology website and pointed out the related videos. Whenever we had a question, they were always willing to help, and their advice had always been instructive. Through the group presentation and reading research articles assigned to us, we slowly enriched our understanding of iGEM competition. Though it was only an introduction for us to step into the vast ocean of iGEM and synthetic biology, it was the first step we officially made, and has always motivated us to move forward.

Apart from the things mentioned above, we spared two separate days in the beginning and ending of the theory training program to give two-round of presentations on our designed projects. Leaders of last year’s teams would act as judges and point out the deficiencies of our plan, as well as offering us their valuable suggestions for improvement. At the end of the whole winter-break training, we were able to present a doable and sound project to the professors, and this could never be achieved without their help.

Experiment training

After theory learning, we experimented the basic operations on molecular cloning under the guidance of last year’s team members, which then became the experimental routine during our whole competition.

As most of us had never conducted molecular cloning, and some had never done wet-lab experiments before, they taught us the necessary steps beforehand, gave us protocols to follow and guided us through the whole process. When we failed at a particular operation, they would lead us to think what may be the trouble, thus teaching us how to debug. It’s their tolerance at our mistakes and their efforts to correct them that accompanied us in conducting our very first molecular cloning and so many more afterward. Of course, all these happened after we passed the safety test.

Throughout the competition

If the selection is the key to open the door of iGEM, and the winter-break training the first step we took to enter, then the competition itself would be the real journey to explore and have fun in the room of synthetic biology. As iGEM competition does not limit itself to lab research, we still have very much to learn, and members from previous years helped us tremendously and selflessly in this process.

It is certain that without the help of previous teams our project won’t be completed this thoroughly and we won’t be able to present our project as it is right now. We sincerely thank members of the previous teams for their help, and we are ready to offer our help to future teams that come.