Achievement

Judging Criteria

1. We have registered our team.
2. We have completed the Judging form.
3. We have set up our wiki.
4. We have prepared our poster and presentation and we are ready to present them in the Asia Jamboree.
5. We have designed and constructed six novel standard BioBrick Parts which are used in our project. All our standard BioBrick Parts have been submitted to the iGEM Registry before the deadline. The quantitative data indicating the functions and characteristics of these parts are shown in our wiki to make them applicable to other teams.
6. We have tested our standard BioBrick Parts in our project with specific experiments, from which we have got qualitative and quantitative results. These BioBricks of our own design and construction work as expected according to the experimental validation. The data and results are accessible in our wiki.
7. We have documented the characterization of our standard BioBrick Parts in the “Main Page” section of the Part’s/Device’s Registry entry. We have submitted one regulatory part (BBa_K1024000), one reporter part (BBa_K1024001), and four signaling parts (BBa_K1024002, BBa_K1024003, BBa_K1024004, & BBa_K1024005).
8. We have submitted our novel standard BioBrick Parts to the iGEM Parts Registry and the submissions adhere to the iGEM Registry guidelines.
9. We have taken the implications for the environment, security, safety, ethics, and sharing into consideration in the design and execution of our project. The aim of our project is constructing novel portable system to detect pathogen with the principles of synthetic biology, which indicates that our system is supposed to be safe to potential patients, easy for usage and sharing, friendly to environment, and acceptable for ethics issues. We choose S. cerevisiae (Yeast) as the host for our system instead of E.coli or other bacteria because yeast is widely used in food and drinks manufacturing which means that yeast is fundamentally friendlier to human health than other microorganisms. Also, the use of yeast would be acceptable for ethical issues and environment-friendly for the reason that the technologies and knowledge about handling yeast have been widely accepted and developed. During the execution of our project, we strictly obey the principles and instructions of doing experiments and implementing our design to make sure that we keep everything in order and safe.
10. We have improved the functions of existing standard BioBrick Parts, entered the information about them in the Registry, created new registry pages for the improved parts and submitted these parts to the iGEM Parts Registry. We constructed and improved standard BioBrick Parts about quorum sensing systems and modified the systems in prokaryotic microorganisms for usage in S. cerevisiae (Yeast). We modified the transcription activator, LuxR (BBa_C0062), by adding nuclear localization signal (NLS) sequence and Herpes simplex virus VP16 activation domain in N-terminus of LuxR, and ligate the sequence of this modified LuxR downstream TEF promoter, which is the constitutive promoter in yeast (BBa_K1024000). Also, we modified the transcriptional regulated promoter in quorum sensing system, Plux promoter (BBa_R0062), by adding cyc100 mini promoter downstream of the Plux promoter (BBa_K1024001).
11. Help any registered iGEM team from another school or institution by, for example, characterizing a part, debugging a construct, or modeling or simulating their system.
12. We help many registered iGEM team from different aspects. First of all, we help OUC-CHINA for their modeling in their project this year. Since we have a member that is very good at modeling, he is always stimulating the biological process using mathematical methods and join a lab in bioinformatics field. Our team and OUC-CHINA established the long term collaboration relationship since 2012 competition. So this year we help their modeling in resetting the parameters to stimulate their system better. Secondly, since our team has participate iGEM for several years, we help a lot of team which are planned to participate iGEM competition this year by sharing our experience including introduction the history, the procedure and rules of iGEM, giving suggestions on some problems a team might face, such as how to organize a team, how to get funding, and how to prepare for everything beyond mere experiments, especially modeling. We did this to several new iGEM teams including BIT, BIT-CHINA, LZU and the students from Nanjing University (though we are not clear which team they finally formed). We even helped the Lanzhou University for prepaying the registration fee, advocating and recruiting the team members, since we saw several freshmen in Lanzhou University have strong passion in participating iGEM so much but they even haven’t have a team leader at that time and are not available to get any grant from their school.
13. A very dramatic events happens in our team and trigger us to create a new method for avocation of synthetic biology as well as the profound discussion of the system chosen of synthetic biology with different iGEM teams. At the very early stage when our team was still experiencing the brainstorming of the project, we had a heat debate with the advisor of our team. We want to use yeast as system since its safer and more suitable to achieve our “switchable box” conception. Yet advisor worried that since iGEM laboratory do not use yeast system in the previous years, the costs of establish a new system might be too much and thus do not support us to continue our idea. At that time, every team member was anxious and even upset, because we think it is obvious that E.coli is not the idea system for our design. One team member wrote a very funny yet actually alluded novel on facebook, the major part of the novel is to describe how a very smart girl try her best to get 5 hundred million dollars even regardless of her life. It is very attractive and just let the reader to wonder why the girl want the amount of money so much. But the surprising ending is that the girl use the money to synthetic a part of the yeast genome and use that to participate the iGEM competition. The novel has a amazing hits (over 7,0000 hits) and are shared by over 4,000 people. You can see the original version of the novel via this link: http://blog.renren.com/blog/244418821/895276049?bfrom=010203042 (unfortunately it is in Chinese rather than English ) After that, many people from different universities E-mail me and discuss the background of the novel. Then our team member introduce the synthetic biology as well as iGEM competition to them and we have a heat discussion about the system chosen of different synthetic biology topics. I should say it is amazing that many people even don’t know there are many systems beside E.coli can be used in synthetic biology. But we change the recognition of them via the content of the novel as well as substantially discussion. Then we found that facebook is actually a very useful and effective platform for synthetic biology issue discussion and propaganda. We establish a common page for synthetic biology on facebook-like website and we make several short films which are very funny but triggers profound thinking of synthetic biology , like ethic issue, does synthetic biology can be used for sex exchange? We introduce this question via the content of one of our short film. We put them on the website and get very good responses. Now the common page are pretty hot and own many fans. Actually we think any topic and especially the synthetic biology is quite close to everyone’s life, closer than those affairs of superstar. Thus everyone who are not major in biology, who don’t know synthetic biology are actually have the knowledge and are able to make suggestions to synthetic biology. Yet the information nowadays explode in internet and for most of the people , the major source of information are from internet as it is fast and more convenient, thus few of them might notice the poster on the wall or are patient enough to listen to a whole lecture with the unattractive topic like” what is synthetic biology? XX tell you A to Z” and so on. Thus the best way to evoke the awareness of people to synthetic biology is by utilizing the resources of which has been used for hotspot news spreading. And also, use the attractive method for avocation. Our team successfully using the same method evoke the heat discussion of the people around us ( in China, since the website are mostly been used by Chinese students) about synthetic biology issues, specific in contradiction of suitable system chosen and funding. We believe the same way works in other synthetic biology issue discussion.