The botanical (latin) name for the Hong Kong Bauhinia flower is Bauhinia x blakeana, with the x denoting it is a hybrid between two species. In the hierarchy of TED talks, TEDx are independent TED-like events organised by volunteers such as universities agreeing to follow certain principles. Bauhinia x has finally met TEDx, with Scott’s talk at TEDxEduHK just being posted online today.
It was nice to talk at TEDxEduHK, as the organisation hosting the event – The Education University of Hong Kong (EduHK) – was located just up the hill from the BGI Hong Kong offices where Scott is based, and the Bauhinia x genome is being sequenced. This isn’t the first TEDx talk carried out by the Bauhinia Genome team as our advisor Prof Hoi-Shan Kwan recently presented “The microbiome and me” at TEDxHKU. This also isn’t the first TEDx talk to mention our work at Bauhinia Genome, as Dr Taras Oleksyk mentioned us in his talk on the Puerto Rica parrot genome at TEDxUPR. Without getting too meta-TEDx, this is the first talk specifically on why and how we carried out this work. Pictures of the event are available from their Flickr page, and the slides are available here.
This has been a busy few months, as on top of talking at TEDx we’ve also presented to visiting sixth formers, been interviewed for Hong Kong cable TV and an upcoming documentary for a mainland Chinese TV station. This also came on top of our recent coverage from BBC Earth. Its not just outreach that is going well, as the science is progressing too. Students at CUHK have done a great job analysis the transcriptomic data and we’ll hopefully have some results to show for that. As the talk says, we hopefully are continuing to make big steps in to getting to know thy DNA.