Overview

In the past few years, the International Genetically Engineered Machine Competition (IGEM) has swept through the world, especially in American, Asian and Europe. As we can see from the Figure 1, since 2003, the number of IGEM team has increased by 24.38% around the world; remarkably, the number of Asian teams has rocketed up from 0 to 78, and in China from 0 to 49. It is obvious that IGEM is rapidly and steadily developing and becoming more and more popular.

Figure 1. Number of IGEM teams. The blue, red and green curves respectively displays the growth tendency about the number of IGEM teams of Worldwide,in Asian and in China.

It is the first time that SCUT has participated in the IGEM. Since March 2012, besides routine experiments about our project, we have been making great efforts to introduce synthetic biology to the school of bioscience and bioengineering and by hardworking, we do expand the influence of IGEM. In other words, Bioscience and IGEM are known by more people. Consequently, it is assumable that more talents are going to be attracted to join in us, join in IGEM next year. As a result, in this year, we have developed a novel theme for human practice of SCUT, “IGEM Everywhere”.

In order to popularize IGEM and synthetic biology, all possible means have been tried, including holding bio-model competition，participating in the IGEM workshop of southern district of china, helping freshmen be familiar with our projects and experiments or sharing our awkward problems and experience with some colleges.

Additionally，we have come up with some novel approaches of human practice in IGEM brainstorm. After a presentation of synthetic biology and IGEM, we can screen out some applicants and subsequently set up a pre-IGEM class. In this class, there has no heavy course load and we just arrange some interesting presentations about SB and new biotechnology regularly. In short, this class is the club for SBers and genius to learn and share information together with each other. This method is not only to advertise the SB and IGEM but also to meet the requirement of these people who are interested in SB and IGEM and would like to make some experiments.

Sincerely hope that “IGEM everywhere” project could help gifted students in school of bioscience and bioengineering of SCUT expand the horizons and accumulate knowledges of synthetic biology and IGEM.