Team:Peking/iGEMClub

iGEM Club

Peking iGEM Club was established in 2007 right after the birth of Peking iGEM Team. As an academic society, Peking iGEM Club aims on developing academic ability of students, especially undergraduates. Research based education is the main purpose of Peking iGEM Club, which is being accomplished by a variety of activities including academic lectures, experiment training and journal clubs.

After several years' development, Peking iGEM Club has become the talent resource of iGEM team. Most team members of Peking iGEM are also members of Peking iGEM Club. After iGEM Jamboree in November, Peking iGEM Club will hold several meeting reviewing this year's competition and discuss those fantastic ideas sparkling from students all over the world. Then, anyone who is interested in Wet Lab could take part in experiment training given by former experienced team members. Through these activities, iGEM team members could transfer their ideas into characteristic plans. To a greater extent, previous academic training can sow the seed of basic rules inside those who have just stepped into academic world. Many former iGEM Club members now are still in the academia and doing researches on advanced topics. iGEM Club is the first step they took in their academic life. Though iGEM Club is just in its infantile time, it gives an applied example transferring common students into professional researchers.

iGEM Club is an academic society welcoming students from all majors. We believe that iGEM is far more than biology, even more than transitionally called sciences. Club members now even include undergraduates studying in liberal arts like social science and history.

26th~27th, Sept, 2014, Peking iGEM Club recruited new members. During this period, team members of Peking iGEM 2014 along with some volunteers were promoting iGEM and synthetic biology to the whole campus. Next Peking iGEM Team will be born from these new members just as those former ones.

Before the recruitment, we have been focusing on popularizing both iGEM Club and synthetic biology. A public page was constructed (Named Peking University iGEM http://page.renren.com/601444914) in renren website, an SNS with almost 300 million registered users and popular in universities of China. During the 2-day recruitment, hundreds of undergraduates and graduates came to our booth learning about iGEM and synthetic biology (Fig. 2&3).

Some of them showed strong passion about future iGEM Competition and were willing to be a team member of future Peking iGEM team. Some students had heard about iGEM before but didn't know detailed information. Therefore, our team members introduced what the competition is, what we did in labs every day, and what we planned to accomplish to them all.

After a 2-day recruitment, more than 50 students registered as new members of Peking iGEM Club. Later, series lectures would be held to them to give an overview about synthetic biology.

Society Goals

iGEM Club, fully named System and Synthetic Biology Society, chose "promoting synthetic biology and developing students' academy skills" as its fundamental target.

Synthetic biology is a rapidly developing discipline. Many students (even they are majoring in life sciences) know little about it. However, synthetic biology gives us a new orientation to study this world. Via synthetic biology, we can design organisms with specific aims rather than screening desired ones from numerous candidates like Mendel (Austrian geneticist, 1822~1884) did with his peas. What's more, synthetic biology provides a platform not only for biology, but also for physics, chemistry, and computer sciences. Synthetic biology is more like a highly merged topic instead of those specific ones, questing for all kinds of skills.

Peking iGEM Club welcomes students from a wide range of majors and every undergraduate can find his position here. We are passionate in promoting synthetic biology to campus, and more than campus. We are willing to use ideas from synthetic biology and advanced technologies solving practical problems.

Establishing the interaction between labs and society is also an important mission for Peking iGEM Club. We are facing a crucial problem that in which way and to what extent can public accept synthetic biology as a tool improving daily life. From iGEM competition, hundreds of shining ideas jumped out from undergraduates' minds, some of them even have been put into application. Unfortunately, many great ideas stopped its step after the competition. Peking iGEM has been building the bridge connecting lab and society, encouraging more and more people learn about the utility of synthetic biology. And we are transmitting the information that under appropriate supervision synthetic biology won’t be a harmful item.

Future iGEMers

Peking iGEM always welcomes the participation of high school students. Every year Peking iGEM gives assistance to high school students who adore synthetic biology, as an avenue promoting synthetic biology to the society. At the same time, working with undergraduates improves academic level of these students. This time, Peking iGEM 2014 provided opportunities to a high school student from Beijing Huiwen Middle School

DU Haoxing participated in Peking iGEM 2014 experiments. She has an extreme interest in synthetic biology and plans to major in life sciences in her college. With passion and keen, she took part in Peking iGEM 2014, working with ZHANG Zijian and MENG Liuyi in binding group.(Figure 5.6)

DU is willing to organize an iGEM team representing her school to present their idea in next year’s iGEM High School Competition. And she thought that working with undergraduates was a good start.

“Working with DU is with great pleasure,” said ZHANG Zijian, a member of binding group. ZHANG’s partner, MENG Liuyi, also gave high comments on working with her. In fact, it is not hard for a high school student to manage basic molecular cloning and DU soon got the basic idea of our project. However, modeling group did spend some time explaining what and how they were doing.

After training for several weeks, Haoxing was capable to design her own experiments and finished them. Though she is lack of financial support and enough assistance, we have the faith that she could be a good leader of an iGEM High School Team.