On April 7th, the day Tianjin University celebrated the Crabapple Blossom Festival, the School of Life Sciences showed the public what life science is about and the wonder of life. It held a specimen exhibition at the university’s History Museum. As the collection of undergraduates’ field survey in Yantai, Shandong Province, the exhibition displayed various specimens, including plants, algae, insects and marine invertebrate specimens. It provided visitors a face-to-face interaction with wild species. Teachers and students acted as tour guides.

In addition to the exhibition, student organizations from the school engaged visitors with easily-operated and interesting experiments to popularize life science knowledge. The iGEM (International Genetically Engineered Machine Competition) group showed gene editing technology related to CRISPR（Clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats）. Children were invited to paint the protein structure of CRISPR and learned the gene pairing theory through a game of double clashes of four colored balls.

The School of Life Sciences was founded in December 2012 with Department of Microbiology and Immunology, Department of Molecular and Structural Biology, and Joint Laboratory of Molecular Biology of Viruses between Tianjin University and Johns Hopkins University.

Written by Wu Xuan

Photos by Ma Ning

Editors: Yin Wei & Doris Harrington