Team:HIT-Harbin/humanpractice/lecture

     Before we recruited our team members, we hold two lectures in our school. One was held in the First Campus. The other was in the Second Campus. We invited our dear professor Xu Dechang in HIT and the respectful professor Chen Ming, the insructor of the ZJU iGEM team, to make lectures about the synthetic biology. The aim of these lectures is to strengthen communication of our team with students from different related fields. We also want to show more about the iGEM and to make a platform for them to know the synthetic biology. By holding the two lectures, we recruited 19 members from different schools. Each of them have different skills and be willing to make contributions to our team. As the old saying in China goes: a good beginning is half of the success. We have the ambition to get a satisfactory result. The lectures include the following information:

The International Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM) competition is a worldwide Synthetic Biology competition aimed at undergraduate university students. Student teams are given a kit of biological parts at the beginning of the summer from the Registry of Standard Biological Parts. Working at their own schools over the summer, they use these parts and new parts of their own design to build biological systems and operate them in living cells. Randy Rettberg, an engineer who has worked for companies including Apple, Sun and BBN is the director of the iGEM competition.

Synthetic biology is a new area of biological research and technology that combines science and engineering. It encompasses a variety of different approaches, methodologies and disciplines with a variety of definitions. The common goal is the design and construction of new biological functions and systems not found in nature.

Engineering Biology is the application of concepts and methods of biology ( and secondarily of physics, chemistry, mathematics and computer science) to solve real-world problems related to the life sciences and/or the application thereof, using engineering’s own analytical and synthetic methodologies and also its traditional sensitivity to the cost and practicality of solution(s) arrived at.

We constructed an enhanced consortium biofilm. The consortium biofilm is composed of the two different engineered E.coli populations, which is able to sense and kill S.aureus, respectively. The enhanced consortium biofilm can promote intra- and inter-species signal transduction and stay stably. The detecting and killing system is distributed in two different engineered strains of E.coli. This will make functions compartmental and reduce metabolism load. On the other hand, this will promote modularity in the level of bacteria.

It’s our second years to have a chance to take part in the world wild championship. In spite of the fact that we don’t have enough experience and financial sponsors, we devoted all of our time to make a better team. We discuss the latest harvests of every member and exchange our ideas. What luck for us is that we have a good leader who have a relationship with everybody and it makes our team more harmonious and our work more effectively.