Human Practice

Brief Introduction

The human practice part of Fudan University iGEM team includes setting up an association to insure a sustainable development, funding an innovation laboratory for students in biology school, holding a Bacteria Painting Competition (BPC) to rise a wide concern of synthetic biology, communicating with other iGEM teams, attending a Chinese iGEM teams’ conference.

Setting up Bertalanffy Association

March, 2014

We set up an association named Bertalanffy aiming to have an organized team to put our planning of human practice into reality while publicizing iGEM and synthetic biology.

The Bertalanffy Association has two recruitment this year, one in March, another in September. We recruit not only students majoring in biology but also those who have an interest in synthetic biology or iGEM. Up to Now, Bertalanffy Association has up to 50 members including more than 10 different majors.

(New members are coming into the Bertalanffy Association)

Funding Innovation Laboratory

April, 2014

Since undertaking our project needs quite a lot hardware and software facilities, we funded the Innovation Laboratory with the help of School of Life Science, Fudan University. The Innovation Lab is available for students participating in competition like iGEM.

As the first settler in the Innovation Lab, our team voluntarily formulate the rules of the lab. It is strongly believed that more and more students who are fascinated by life science will join in our team or join the lab to do their own research.

(Here we are introducing the Innovation Lab to professors and students in Fudan)

Bacteria Painting Competition (BPC)

May, 2014

The Bacteria Painting Competition (BPC) held in June, is a competition that participators use GFP/RFP injected bacteria to draw their works on petri dishes. Thepictures will finally come to light under ultraviolet ray after a 12 hours cultivation.

More than 50 students took part in the BPC this year, and most of them chose to pay more concern on iGEM and synthetic biology after their amazing experience with bacteria and petri dishes.

(Here our members are explaining how to go throw the painting)

Communicating with Other iGEM Teams

June, 2014

It’s our honor to have abundant communications with universities like Zhejiang University, Tongji University and so on. During these friendly discussion, consensus were reached and incredible ideas were brought up.

(Having convenient conversation with Zhejiang University)

Attending the Chinese iGEM Teams’ Conference

August, 2014

In August 3-7, our team attended a Chinese iGEM teams’ conference organized by Taiwan National Chiao Tung University.

During the conference, we listened to other teams’ presentation and introduce our work and design to them. It is so exciting to learn others’ design and gain ideas from them. We also got some advice and instruct from a teacher of Taiwan National Chiao Tung University. We communicated a lot during the trip to Taiwan; we gain a lot, and we hope we can hold a conference like this the next year to gather the teams of Asia together to talk about our work.

(This is our certification of appreciation)

Helping NYU to build their team

A student of NYU wanted to build their team the next year 2015 and turned to us for help. We help them to know more about iGem and taught them how to build a lab for iGem. They will build their team to attend iGem in 2015 probably.

Safety

Safety

Overview

Since the concern of Lab accident or biological contamination has been increased year by year, we attached special importance to the safety issue of our project. Here we present our efforts on safety assurance in 4 different ways, which are Lab Safety, Public Safety, Project Safety, and Suggestion on Safety.

Information

Risk Group: Group 1 (low risk)

Laboratory Safety Level: Level 2 (moderate safety procedures)

Lab Safety

No immediate risk can be found on the researchers’ safety in our project, as we formulated several regulations concerning safety management. The regulations includes researcher’s signing in rules, instrument specifications, and, of course, the basic Lab behavior specifications.

We require every researcher to sign in and out with their name and time on a notebook, thus making research progress known by the whole team.

Details about apparatus were also put on every Lab our team members may appear. Moreover, we had a special training leading every pre-researchers to good laboratory practice before they undertaking there work in Lab.

In addition, there are a number of lab reagents we required for our project that might be harmful on contact. To reduce the risk of these chemicals, chemical safety sheets were written to inform researchers to work with them safely. As for the UV risk, researchers are required to wear personal protective equipment, such as UV protective goggles.

Public Safety

All the waste, under the guidance of our instructors and advisers, is well taken care of. To have better understanding of public safety protecting, we invited several experienced researcher, including the vice-president of our faculty.

Project Safety

No extra contaminating product nor harmful outputs has been found during the whole process of our research, indicating a reliable design and safe bio-brick parts/devices. Up till now, no safety issues has been raised, whether from our teammates or our instructors.

And, yes, we followed every steps hanged on the Safety Hub. In addition, all the requirement were carefully read, forms like Check-Ins or About Our Lab were completed on time.

Suggestion on Safety

We believe that more concentration should be paid on recyclable bio-consumables which are more environmental friendly than disposable supplies but may cause more safety problems.

Improvement

As is known to all, until iPSC came to light, cell differentiation in vivo is generally differentiated from stem cells as a source of a variety of differentiation, while the animal somatic cells is generally considered not pluripotent. Although. by inducing expression of progenitor cells for the treatment of disease has thus become possible, to give the desired cell line is still inconvenient for the patient.

    That is why we are trying to establish a conceptual cell lines——to design a plasmid controller, which will be stably transfected to cells, and thus to make the cell express different genes induced to differentiate into different cell by the addition of different chemicals. Since, our plasmid controller may have an advance in both cost and efficiency, we wanna make it a gift, for both institute and hospital, which solves the sharp conflicts between doctors and patients. We put this idea into every human practice we hold aiming at rise a wide concentration about conflicts between doctors and patients, to make things cheap and quick.

Thanks to

We wanna send our sincere thanks to the following organization:

Extra thanks to the following organization for their support for undertaking our Bacteria Painting Competition (BPC):