From November 9 to 13, 2017, the 13th International Genetically Engineered Machine Competition (iGEM) was held in Boston, USA. The undergraduate team SCUT-FSE-CHINA from School of Food Science and Engineering won the Gold Medal in its first battle of iGEM. It is the first time that undergraduate students from our School take part in iGEM, and they won Gold Medal because of their outstanding project, high quality performance, excellent Wiki design and the successful poster, presentation and oral defense. Their project was also nominated as Best New Application Project in this competition.
Their project,“Robust E. coli for Fermentation”, aiming at the problems of bacteria contamination and bacteriophage infection during fermentation processes, focus on the idea of environmentfriendly fermentation. Through the modification and modeling of the nitrogen and phosphorus metabolic pathways in E. coli and simultaneous introduction of anti-T7 phage elements, the team has successfully constructed robust E. coli that can inhibit the growth of undesired bacteria under special nitrogen and phosphorus sources and resist phage infection. This project provides new idea to reduce energy consumption of sterilization as well as the production cost, which has important application in the future. More detail about the project can be assessed at the Wiki: http://2017.igem.org/Team:SCUT-FSE-CHINA.
Members mainly from our School form the SCUT-FSE-CHINA team; they are Huixian Li, Zisan Huang, Xiaojia Liu, Qi Pan, ZhiyiQiao, Qisheng He,Derun Zhang, and XiaoyangOu. This team is supported and instructed by Prof. Wenyong Lou,Associate Prof. ZhengboXu, and Prof. Gu Chen.
Organized by the MIT and the iGEM Council, iGEM is an essential international competition in synthetic biology and involves multiple disciplines, such as biology, computer science, and mathematics. It targets to encourage students to innovate actively, with the concern about public promotion and cooperation, which demands comprehensive ability of participants. In 2017, 313 teams from 46 countries including Harvard, MIT, Cambridge, Oxford, Peking University and Tsinghua University took part in this competition.(By Gu Chen)
