Plant Rubbing & Making Ambers

we held the plant rubbing & making ambers activity in our campus in April 11 to 12 as the first human practice activity , trying to interest the public, especially children and let them know the fantasy of animals and plants with some sensitivity. We are glad to see hundreds of people participating in our activities and manufacturing their own linen pocket with plants rubbed on it and ambers guided by our staffs.

Plant Rubbing

We orginally put forward an idea to let chlorophyll or anthcyanin rubbed directly on the pockets. However, considering its possibility of degradation, consequently we decided to suggest participators applying the paint on the leaves. So we pick up some leaves from acertruncatum,metasequoia glyptostroboides,Broussonetia papyrifera and ginkgo biloba. The whole procedure goes like this: participators pick up a leaf they like and then apply some paint on the back of the leaf evenly and uniformly. After that, rub the plant on a linen pocket with hammer. Later, the leaves appears on the pocket. Some people decorate the different pigment on leaves and other draw a loving heart beside the leaves for their lovers. Well we explain to children about photosynthesis based on pigments like chlorophyll and light reaction system simultaneously. We hope they remember the knowledge of biology and enjoy the experience in Plant Rubbing.

Making Ambers

The 'making ambers' activity is held for making the public know the process of formation of natural ambers and triggering their interest in insects. We bought some insects specimen online with colophony prepared for drawing it. So we in advance melt the colophony and then direct the kids and parents to poiled the colophony into a glass bottle with a insect inside. After a while, colophony sodificated and amber was completed.

Many kids said they enjoyed playing with insects in spare time, intrigued in picking up and recognizing animals and wanted to get into the nature more. Thus, we sincerely hoped that our activity again motivated their impetus to discover more magical things in our world.

Lab Open Day

The lab open day is an annual activity in our school held on May. This year, in 18 to 19 May, we opened our lab to welcome the public from all Hefei City and even far from Xi'an City to know what we are doing and what are genetic engineering and iGEM. We organized the following activities:

Introduce the daily laboratory appratus to the kids and students such as centrifuge, vibrator, PCR Instrument, high pressure steam sterilization pot and incubator etc. We expained the mechanism of some of them and we were glad to see some middle school students caring about the working mechanism of centrifuge. So we continued teaching them more about the physical knowledge in it and it felt really pretty good to share them with our lose and gain and enlighten the kids who interested in science.

View microscope and anatomical len: we collected some fresh flowers and leaves as well as cell slider including our Caulobacter crescentus and our staffs teaches the kids how to use a microscope to observe the micro scale world and guide them to carefully dissect the flowers with tweezers. Many kids in China still were lack of opportunity to get in touch with the real science, which they could only read and learn from books. Consequently, we hoped this activity to trigger their motivation to not only think carefully but do meticulously.

Class for kids: we exquisitely prepared a presentation particularly to kids to introduce the basic knowledge of DNA and genetic engineering with simple words and lovely pictures. We are surprised to know that children know the name of DNA, while they almost misunderstand the essence of DNA. So we instructed them about the scale, location, function, discovery and shape of DNA based on history and research. Besides, genetic engineering was also introduced using chocolate biscuits as example. We wished kids possess a memory about the mechanism in biological world and the seed sowed by us could prosper in future:)

Fold It! Well it is a game invented by Baker Lab from Washington University and introduced by 2010 Washington iGEM. We introduced the game to the public and especially high school or college students so that the students who have a little background of molecular biology is capable of understanding the best structure of proteins in some optimums. When the students knew that the structure of a reverse transcriptase(RT) in HIV, on which scientists have worked for more than fifteen years, was solved by player in ten days, we saw their great ambitions to participate in solving global problems they are good at and intrigued in. Well, this is why we hold it!

Panel session: This session is almost for students and adults to let them know the iGEM, establishment and history of our team built in 2007 and future of synthetic biology and biological technology. Because the public in China recently is concerned about GMO severely, what we want to do is to introduce the genetic engineering technology directly and briefly and let the public to judge whether the GMO is safe for our daily requires with our lead tip. We are trying our best to landfill the gap between the fast developing science and puzzled people even if we finally are able to influence few. We still believe few can influence more with their constructive suggestion and going into action so that one day people in China, even in all over the world, go forward with science shoulder with shoulder