Team:NYMU-Taipei

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NYMU iGEM

Welcome to our Campus !

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Founded in 1974, National Yang-Ming University, formerly known as National Yang-Ming College of Medicine, has been adhering to the school motto of "benevolent mind and art, putting knowledge into practice" while training excellent humane doctors to provide service by solving medical problems in remote and rural areas.

Our success is no coincidence but an attribute of excellent allocation of limited resources and the devoted efforts of both the faculty and students, all of which were needed to achieve "brilliant results in teaching and research" within such a short period of time. Due to our research atmosphere, academic accomplishments, innovative knowledge and cultivation of talent, we have well demonstrated our standing as a top university.

One Team One Goal
After devoting ourselves to amazing ideas for half of the summer vacation, it is high time for us to share the inspiration, excitement and initial results. On August 15th, let's huddle, dear iGEMers. Let dreams from synthetic biology tie all of us together.



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Contents

Our iGEM Project:

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* Nitrogen Metabolism

  • With an eye to combat the environmental issues related to nitrogen oxides, we have designed circuits that can produce nitrogen oxides reductases and transcriptional regulators into our organisms so that harmful nitrogen oxides can be reduced to nitrogen. Combined with the sulfur metabolism pathway and Calvin cycle that are inherent in cyanobacteria, we provide an eco-friendly, multi-function solution to the air pollution problem.
  • This is a promising project with huge commercialized potential since the mass production of bioreactors full of our organisms is foreseeable. What is more interesting, with the help of division inhibitor, gene for invasion, we can install our designation into human cells as artificial organelles and grant human being the ability to survive in extreme environments such as Venus without wearing bulky space suits.


* Sulfide Metabolism

  • We all know that sulfide dioxides are one of the pollutants in urban area globally. In addition, sulfide compounds also exist on Venus. Therefore, we first think about how to reduce the sulfide dioxides in the atmosphere on earth; then we can move our project further on Venus.
  • Our plan is to develop a system which can reduce the SO2 into H2S using the genes in microorganisms like sulfate reducing bacteria, such as Desulfovibrio desulfuricans. After we acquire H2S, we may use bacteria such as Oscillatoria limnetica, Rhodobacter capsulatus, and Cyanobacteria PCC7002 which contain Sulfide-quinone reductase(SQR).By using SQR, we can then use H2S as the reducing energy and can get carbohydrates such as glucose, and can provide them as the energy for creatures to survive.


* Symbiosis

  • Every year, iGEMers create plenty of bioparts. They code for peptides, proteins or composite parts for all kinds of functions. However, they are just DNA sequences. But what if we create parts at the scale of organelles? With this approach, we can implant any cells into the host depending on what kinds of functions we hope to see in it.
  • Comparing with transforming cells using merely simple DNA sequence, implanting new organelles can bring more complicated functions and more precise controlling systems. We can dream about making eukaryote to fix nitrogen, reduced sulfite, or even making animals to photosynthesize! Or we can create organisms that can live in other planets!


Responses to Safety Questions

1. Would any of your project ideas raise safety issues in terms of:



2. Do any of the new BioBrick parts (or devices) that you made this year raise safety issues? If yes,



3. Is there a local biosafety group, committee, or review board at your institution?



4. Do you have any other ideas how to deal with safety issues that could be useful for future iGEM competitions? How could parts, devices and systems be made even safer through biosafety engineering?