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 24.38% around the world; moreover, there is a boom in the number of team in Asian from 0 to 78, and in China from 0 to 49. It is evidently that IGEM is developing rapidly as well as steadily and becoming more and more popular.

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

It is the first time for SCUT (South China university of technology) to participate the IGEM. Since March 2012, besides routine experiment about our project, we have tried to introduce synthetic biology and expand the influence of iGEM around the school of bioscience and bioengineering to attract more people so that we can make Bioscience and IGEM known by public and have charm to appeal more talents to join IGEM and join us next year. So, this year, we have developed a novel theme for human practice of SCUT, "IGEM Everywhere".

For broadcasting iGEM and making people know what synthetic biology is, we almost permeate every corner by various approaches，holding bio-model competition，participating the IGEM workshop of southern district of china, helping freshmen be familiar with our project and experiment or sharing our awkward problems and experience with some colleges.

Additionally, we have come up with some novel approach of human practice in brainstorm of IGEM. After a presentation of synthetic biology and IGEM, we can interview some application and subsequently set up a pre-IGEM class. In this class, there haven’t heavy course load and we just arrange interesting presentation about SB and new biotechnology regularly. In short, this class is the club of SB and genius join it to learn and share information together. This method is not only broadcast the SB and IGEM but also further adapt the requirement of these people interested SB and IGEM and would like to handle some experiment.

Hoping “IGEM everywhere” project could expand the horizon and increase the knowledge of synthetic biology and IGEM of genius student of school of bioscience and bioengineering of SCUT.