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Team:BIT-China/humanpractice.html
From 2013.igem.org
Meaning
Lots of examples show that human over-exploitation of the natural world, as a significant amount of debt owed to nature, will always suffer because they cannot repay the revenge of nature in the whole human history. Industrial society will do more damage to the environment with a larger scale and higher speed consuming natural resources than agricultural community.
According to the book named "Limits to Growth" written by DH Meadows, coal, oil, metals and other non-renewable resources will exhauste 2100 ago. Even though this estimate has some exaggerated factors, we could not pass up these resources for centuries in any case. In another side, renewable resource, such as fertile land, forests, flora and fauna, air and water, has suffered a permanent damage result from the development of industrial world. The global wildlife has been facing a major crisis.
Perspective on the current level of industrial development: In the past 10 years, papers from biotechnology and medicine are 49% of the natural sciences all over world; recently, about 40% to 50% of annual Top Ten scientific and technological achievements are in life scientific fields at home and abroad. biotechnology industry based on biotechnology and life sciences makes more progress, and has introduced new products and new patents. Biotechnology industry has become an international technological competition as well as the focus of economic competition, and it will also become a powerful weapon to help humans live in harmony with nature.
June 1972, "The First Human Environment Conference" was held in Stockholm, Sweden sponsored by the United Nations. It make progress for international environmental. "Declaration on the Human Environment" than was passed in this meeting is the first global international documents in human history to protect the environment, and it marks the birth of the international environmental law.
The International Environmental Education Conference, which published the famous "Belgrade Charter," was held in Belgrade in 1975. This Charter sets out the purpose, goals, objects and guiding principles of environmental education.
Copenhagen World Climate Conference was held in Copenhagen the capita of Danish in2009, and it absorbed many representatives from 192 countries, who are to discuss the follow-up program after the first stage of "Kyoto Protocol" expired. The conference is regarded as "the last chance to save humanity". After that, "United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change" published.
Nowadays,energy crisis and global warming have become increasingly prominent and threated the healthy development of human society. To solve these issues to some extent, we，members from BIT-CHINA,investigate the basis of Bioproduction process at home and abroad and hope to create one kind of heat self-regulated E.coli with the help of synthetic biology.
We can see that E. coli is still the main industrial model strain used in the process of domestic production of bio-based chemicals from the current industrial production process. Applying our new E.coli to the fermentation industry is important to biological industry restructuring and healthy development. Our research can broaden the optimum fermentation temperature of E.coli to effectively activate reaction process, accelerate the metabolic process flow and control the reaction mass transfer efficiency, and thereby improving the efficiency of cell product synthesis; In addition, the application of this project can effectively save water and power resources, reduce fuel consumption, such as coal and oil, and thus greatly reduce the amount of CO2 generated by thermal power, effectively curb global warming and other environmental issues.Last but not least, our project is conducive to the sustainable development in our society, the harmony in natural ecosystems, and the environmental protection of global village,
BIT-China for one green Earth!
Communication
In April 2013, teachers and part of the team members in BIT - China came to Tianjin university which is more than 100 kilometers far from our country to have some tacademic exchanges of synthetic biology. Tianjin university is one of oldest famous institution of higher learning in China. Since 2009, the team Tianjin led by Li Bingzhi has always been active in the iGEM competition platform and made remarkable achievements. This year is the first time we BIT - China in Beijing institute of technology take part in iGEM competition, and this meeting provided us an opportunity to communicate with them to make us more deeply understand the form of iGEM competition, content and some matters needing attention and bring us more convenience. Synthetic biology in our university also belongs to the early stage. In this exchange activity, we knew more about the development of synthetic biology and mature application of synthetic biology. How to better use the method of synthetic biology and make more people know about synthetic biology becomes our common goals.
In September we had a chance to share our idea with the Peking team. They introduced their project and we showed our presentation to them. Their teacher point out our shortcoming and gave us some advices. Because it is our first time to take part in iGEM, so they gave us many suggestions about the program of competition. In a word, we learn a lot from them and set up a friendship with peking team.
In May 2013, BIT - China came to Tsinghua university made communication activities with iGEM teams named Tsinghua led by Chen Guoqiang on synthetic biology. Tsinghua university is one of the most famous universities, the high-level personnel training and the important bases of scientific and technological research in China. We really admired the long history of Tsinghua university mixed with young vitality of new power of synthetic biology. From the first race in 2009 to today, Tsinghua has been in the high level of entries to inspire us make more progress as the models. Although iGEM's only a game, it has set up a platform to share, propaganda and explore the synthetic biology. We rejoice for the vigorous development of new technology, and are proud that we can do our best to enter the science hall.Although iGEM's only a game, it has set up a platform to share, propagate and explore the synthetic biology.
A model iGEM was hosted on 7 September by peking team, seven teams came for it. These universities include Tianjin University, Fudan University, Ocean University of China and so on. The activity was made by two parts: presentation and poster. In presentation, every team showed a different style, and their projects are creative and wonderful. We learnt from each other and found many advantages to polish our project.
Promotion
As a sponsor of our team, COFCO has provided us with great opportunities to communicate with fermentation companies and biological experts. COFCO is the largest supplier of diversified products and services in the agricultural products and food industry in China. We set up the bridge of cooperation for COFCO that they use our product to promote their fermentation technology. This relationship can help us verify our result in manufacturing. And our product might be industrialized.
In September, our team has got an opportunity to go to COFCO for communication.
Engineers and experts in COFCO provided many valuable practical suggestions for us. They suggest us to confirm our data resource further. To overcome these problems, we built the model “heat＆quantity” to predict the optimal temperature. This communication help us understand the aim of our work better.
By now, COFCO have used our product in saccharomycetes in testing phases. It's predictable that this project will be utilized in fermentation to economize the costing of fermentation industry.
In the last term, our school have already held several lectures about iGEM in Liangxiang campus of BIT. So this time, we mainly focused on the project of our team and recruited new membership for next year’s competition. We spent about one hour to show our project in detail, meanwhile we also exchanged different suggestions and ideas with audiences who are from life school or other majors. By our lecture, the students have a further understanding of whether synthetic biology or iGEM. What’s more, these junior students are so enthusiastic that more than forty of them wanted to join iGEM. We really appreciate it and we believe with so much power our team can perform better in the next year.
This night, our team made a lecture in The high school affiliated to Minzu University of China which aimed at introducing synthetic biology and iGEM to high school students. During the lecture, firstly our teammates summarized synthetic biology briefly. Then we showed some simple examples in advanced synthetic biology and our project according to the audiences’ knowledge. After that, iGEM was introduced specifically especially the high school iGEM. We displayed the situation of teams of Chinese high school in the past few years. In this aspect, those young girls and boys showed great passion and asked us many valuable questions. Certainly, each of us answered these questions patiently and encouraged them who are interested in iGEM come to BIT for the further communication. Meanwhile, we built up relationship with the biology club of High School. Hopefully, in the near future, more and more Chinese high school students will participate in iGEM family.
BIT-CHINA team of BIT gave a lesson to the pupil of Wanquan primary school on September 27, 2013. First of all, we toked something like life, environment protect, energy. Then we told the children what is the synthetic biology and how can they work use synthetic biology. Third we explain the importance of synthetic and iGEM. At last we let the kids to think about what can we do thought synthetic biology. Kids are very interested and excited, they came up with many ideas which came form children’s life and they experience. what made me happy is the pupil are seem interested to synthetic biology,. I believe somebody of them will make that more advanced.
On September 18, 2013, BIT - CHINA team came to Sunny Baby Kindergarten and spent a pleasant afternoon with children. While discussing with preschool children in biology frontier such as synthetic biology sounds funny, we are not constrained in the exchange form, We can also help these children remind of the interest of science. The communication of the kindergarten was one of the most successful one in all our activities. "What are bacteria?" "You know what the biology is?" "Have you heard gene?" "The design of synthetic biology is just like the children building blocks, and what kind of synthetic biology building do you want to build?" Here, we also felt their rich imagination and full of vitality, and we believe that they will exert their director to make a better future.
