Education& Collaboration

Multiple researches provided evidence that Gastric Cancer (GC) has a significant negative impact worldwide. This year, the YiYe-China team focused on early diagnosing this serious disease that caused abundant tragedies. We realized the consequence of raising people’s awareness of the unpromising current situation of early-stage cancer diagnoses in China. We promoted our project on several social media platforms, domestic and abroad.

Since our team includes a firm knowledge foundation of professors, masters, and team members who are passionate about biology, we aimed to utilize these resources to improve people’s mindsets toward a healthier lifestyle and raise people’s awareness to diagnose disease in an early stage or treat cancer by putting maximum effort.

Thus, we devoted much effort to erasing the information gap between professionals and the public. Therefore, we were determined to introduce the beauty of biology to the society. To expand our influence and increase the availability of knowledge (breaking the boundary between regions and countries), we used four different social media, including WeChat, bilibili, TikTok, and Instagram.

According to statistical data, WeChat users have reached 1.37 billion worldwide. Therefore, we opened a WeChat official account of our team to promote our program. We published articles, photos, videos, etc., on synthetic biology and GC-relating knowledge through the WeChat official account to address health issues and support science popularization in China.

We held several promotional activities in high schools in various areas of China, including Beijing, Wuhan, etc. During these activities, we introduced our project to high school students. We’ve pointed out the seriousness of Gastric Cancer, hoping to raise the audience’s awareness of early GC diagnosis.

We also released the interviews with professors and doctors and shared our thoughts on the account.

According to an article in Nature, a cancer diagnosis has experienced a younger trend. Therefore, we decided to open an official account on Bilibili, a popular platform among Chinese Gen-Zs.

We released our promotion video and held several live screens about GC and related knowledge on the platform.

Besides using social media to promote scientific knowledge, which has gained sufficient results, we also wanted to contribute directly to our communities. Direct communication with people increases efficiency and enhances our ability to convey our message about synthetic biology, gastric cancer, and our project, also, our beliefs to make the world better.

As a team, we designed our own logo and uniform. The logo combines the image of gastric and heart, symbolizing our deep determination to fight against Gastric Cancer.

We’ve also designed and printed booklets, posters and fans to promote our project and some related knowledge of GC.

Hubu Lane is a famous tourist attraction in Wuhan. This made it a perfect place for us to promote our project to more people. To make our project more memorable and attract more people, we designed fans that had our logos and printed posters. At Hubu lane, we set up our poster, distributed our fans, and explained our project to locals and tourists. The crowd learned facts about GC prevention, realized the importance of on-time medical examinations, and became well-acquainted with our project.

In Wuhan, student leader Yuhao Chen introduced our work to the Wuhan Foreign Languages School students at the meeting of their club. Chen focused on the importance of early GC diagnosis, which is the main purpose of our project. He pointed out the advantage of our design in the early diagnosis.

After our successful public awareness activity in Wuhan, we came up with an idea to bring the knowledge back to each of our teammates’ individual hometowns in their own communities.

As the capital of China, Beijing has a large population and advanced medical service. In Beijing, we presented our project in Beijing Huijia Private School. Student leader Yang Wei introduced our design to his classmates and highlighted the innovation we’ve made. Meanwhile, he reviewed our protocol and discussed it with the audience.

On July 13th, our team attended the 11th Conference of the China iGEMer Community (2024 CCiC). At this stage, we had just finished our project design and started wet lab experiments. We constructed two plasmids, pCMV-EGFP-EIF3B-HSU and pMIR-EIF3B-HSU, preliminarily in order to gain some data. Those data significantly helped us with further understanding of HSU mRNA and the plasmids we used and guided our experiment firmly.

With this approach in mind, our team participated in the Conference of China iGEMer Community (CCiC). Through listening to presentations, we found two teams with topics and approaches highly related with our own: BUCT-China team and CJUH-JLU0China team. We quickly got in touch with these two teams and scheduled to meet online on August the 1st.

On August 1st, our team communicated online with two iGEM teams: BUCT-China and CJUH-JLU-China. First, each team made a presentation explaining their project in detail. Afterward, we exchanged questions we had about each others’ projects and provided answers. Lastly, we shared advice from different perspectives, hoping to support each other.

In the morning, we had a meet-up with the BUCT-China team. Their team designed a tool utilizing miRNA and CRISPR technology to detect tumors. Through their presentation, we learned that the BUCT-China team has conducted lots of meaningful human practice (HP) activities. They emphasized the importance of HP in connecting our project with our society. Upon our communication, we decided to organize more education events in our schools and communities, posing a stronger positive influence on the people around us.