Difference between revisions of "Team:Mingdao/Human Practices 2-1-3"

Meetups: NCHU-Taichung, NCTU-Formosa, NTHU-Taiwan, NTHU-Formosa, Baltimore_BioCrew, CCU-Taiwan
Date: through iGEM 2018 season
Location: Mingdao High School or National Chiao Tung University
Sharing: motivation, iGEM experience, etc.

Date: Apr. 3, 2018
Location: Mingdao High School



Why: To exchange concerns and questions relating to each of our project

How: Give presentation and discuss via Q&A

What:

We talked about the idea of GE mosquitoes and the aplication in blood testing. And they shared their project concerning clean environmental pollutants by GE plants. After a brief understanding of both of our project, we shared our future plans, difficulties and suggestions in a mutual way. We all knew that promoting GMO to the public is not easy and limited by law regulation. Although there’s still many controversial problem, we are encouraged by several GE crops that are widely available. And we discussed these problems in Taiwan. Before NCHU left Mingdao, they visited our Biolab and amazed at what we can do as a high school students and in the campus of a high school.

Reflection:

We all learned a lot from this meeting. For instance, their human practice is made up of integrated human practice and education. One is related to experiment and the other promotes social education. Also, the attributions of their team is organized. Some of them are in charge of botany, others are in charge of microbiology, and the others are responsible for human practices. All of them have a clear vision of what they are doing. That’s what we need to learn from them.

Date: Jul. 23, 2018
Location: National Chiao Tung University

Our team went to NCTU to participate in an iGEM meetup with one NCTU team and two NTHU teams this morning. We listed some questions from them and the answers. Q1. Which living things are you going to apply this system to? A1. We are going to apply the AMP reporter system to mosquitoes as a biosensor. Q2. Why are you using mosquitoes? It seems to have many problems using mosquitoes. A2. Mosquitoes can act as a natural syringe. They’re tiny and easy to carry, and they’re naturally good at collecting blood. Most importantly, it is biodegradable compared to other syringes. Q3. What are the advantages of your method compared to saliva samples? Using saliva samples is as convenient, too. A3. The windows period of saliva samples is three months. On the other hand, our method is only one to two weeks. (When infected by HIV, it takes some time to produce HIV antibody. Before it produces enough antibodies for us to detect it, the result would be negative. The time before it produces enough antibodies is called windows period.) Q4. How about your mosquitoes are reluctant to suck blood? A4. We had discussed this question with Dr. Tseng, a mosquito expert working at NCHU. According to his explanation, mosquitoes from the laboratory are always willing to suck blood during daytime. If you place your hand into the mosquito breeding cage, they will suck your blood in five minutes. Keeping the mosquitoes in a hungry state can increase the possibility of mosquitoes sucking blood. Then we visited the biological technology laboratory at NCTU. We saw many equipment there, including those that Mingdao lab doesn’t have.

Visit: a member, Zoe, from United State
Date: Aug. 15, 2018
Location: Mingdao Bio Lab

Today, we met up with Zoe from Baltimore iGEM team. She talked about her team’s two projects and how they divide their work. Surprisingly, although she is younger than us and haven't learn about senior high mathematics, she explained it to us clearly and show us the software she used. We had a leisure lunch that day.

Date: Aug. 18, 2018
Location: Mingdao Bio Lab

Mingdao iGEM first gave a brief introduction on our mosquito and HIV experiments. Then CCU explained their project about a novel plastic material with natural lignin. During the meeting, both teams would pause at each slide to discuss the questions and share ideas. We then exchanged surveys and gave some opinions to each other. Before leaving, team CCU visited our laboratory and Fab Lab where we will create our prototype.

They gave us tough questions and we need time to figure out. Some questions are listed below:



1. How much does your prototype cost?
2. How can we transfer DNA into the mosquito? What techniques does it require?

3. Can you quantify the amount of DNA you inserted into the mosquito?

4. How long does the DNA exist in the mosquito if transiently injected?
5. Is their difference between African mosquitos and others? 
6. How long is a life cycle of a mosquito?