In order to unite the students who embrace huge passion in the field of synthetic biology and propagandize iGEM, we established this group in March, 2013. We aim to combine amusement and science together to live a wonderful lab life. Meanwhile, we also communicated with other iGEM teams as a group. This summer, most students of our group devoted themselves into working on the idea we came up with independently half a year ago. Moreover, we hope that through iGEM, we can not only increase our quality of research, but also strengthen own team cooperation. After iGEM 2013, this group will still exist and we are going to make it more influential.
Being fresh in iGEM, it's important for us to communicate with a sophisticated team who can help us grow more quickly. In this way, we can also establish friendship with people who have the same dream with us. Under this circumstance, we went to Beijing and visited Tsinghua University in November, 2012.
During this trip, we visited 3 teams, Tsinghua-A, Tsinghua-C and Tsinghua-D, and communicated with them well. As experienced iGEM competitors, they successfully showed a more clear scenery of iGEM and synthetic biology to us, who haven't stepped into this field before. Besides, Tsinghua-A have introduced the model part in iGEM to us and promised to help us for the lack of modeler in our team. Of course, all of them sincerely remind us of the hardship in this process and we have also talked over the questions like how to come up with a good idea, how to assess and realize them. When we left THU, we had learned so much and both Tsinghua and our team members thought that we should keep contact with each other in the future and step forward together.
This is the 2nd year since for Nanjing University to participate in the IGEM, so it is necessary to spread the basic principles of synthetic biology and introduce the iGEM to more students in NJU.
To achieve this goal, in April, we invited 2 leaders of other iGEM teams in China to give lectures on synthetic biology for students from different majors. XiRui, the leader of SJTU-BioX-Shanghai, 2012, introduced the iGEM from a new perspective. She shared their experience on the IGEM project, which have had profound impact on our project. Meanwhile, Wei Lei, the leader of Tsinghua-A, 2012, showed us how they combine synthetic biology with automation technology, promoting our understanding of the concept and methods of interdisciplinary. Audiences attending the lecture were all deeply impressed and attracted by the iGEM and synthetic biology.
The 28th China Adolescents Science and Technology Innovation Contest (CASTIC) was held on August 4th in Nanjing. This annual contest covering science, engineering and social science, is held by the China Association for Science and Technology and the ministries of education, science and technology. Every year, more than 15 million young people take part in the contest.China's future stars of science and technology from primary and secondary schools nationwide gathered in Nanjing to show the fruit of their scientific research.
Obviously this was a great chance to introduce synthetic biology and iGEM to youth in China, so we propagated the basic theory of synthetic biology and the idea of our team to them by handing out leaflets and communicating face to face.Many of them showed great interest in IGEM. We also hope to grab this opportunity to allow them a greater interest in synthetic biology.
Throughout our project, we took notice of the fact that ZJU-China team and our team both focus on the degradation of atrazine.
Under this circumstance, we collaborated a lot with them, such as sharing experience, exchanging ideas about environmental protection, and encouraging each other when got stricken. Especially,we offered TrzN, a gene can degrade atrazine to them, which may be of great help for their projects.
Both of the two outstanding teams learnt a lot from each other's experience, and improved our ideas and designs through the process of free discussion.
Although iGEM also has High School Division, few local high school students know about iGEM and synthetic biology. In order to let them have a rational understanding and encourage more students to participate in the IGEM competition, we decided to introduce synthetic biology, IGEM and our project in the form of lectures.
In the lecture, we used the third biological revolution to give way to synthetic biology. And we introduced synthetic biology and iGEM in a vivid way.When we talked about synthetic biology, we delivered the idea of synthesis. When we speak of iGEM, we delivered several key points that comprise a whole project in iGEM: a practical idea, construction of gene circuits, verification, modification, safety and human practice. What's more, we emphasized the idea of engineer and standardization. At last, we introduced our project.
After the lecture, many students showed great interest in iGEMHigh School Division. We hope that we did could influence more and more people to participate in this competition and enjoy it.
We have always been considering to apply our project tothe field of farming industry and environmental governance. Guided by this belief, we visited the Time Farm, a newly built organic farm in Nanjing.
The technology of this farm is based on permaculture. They want to cultivate healthy products by constructing harmonized eco-environment. In the process of communication, we learned that they purify water mainly by constructing artificial wetlands and spraying organic fertilizer which contains a lot of microorganisms. These strategies indeed obtains satisfying results in water purification, and the products are much healthier than those cultivated in the original farms. However, some refractory deleterious organic compounds used in other areas around the organic farm, for example, atrazine, may still remain in the water. In this case, bacteria with biological function may benefit the farmers a lot. They also realized that synthetic biology could be an effective and environmental friendly tool in the near future.(Friendly link: Time Farm http://www.timefarm.com.cn)
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