Achievements

Our achievements are summed up as below according to the iGEM 2014 Judeging Form.

For a Bronze Medal

• We have registered the offical team as ordered, we shared a great summer within our team and with iGEMers of other teams. We hope to have fun at the Giant Jamboree 2014.
• We successfully completed and submitted the iGEM 2014 Judging form.
• We created and shared a description of the team's project using the iGEM wiki and the team's parts using the Registry of Standard Biological Parts.
• We’ve get fully prepared to present a Poster and Talk at the iGEM Jamboree. Wish us luck\^-^/
• The description of our project has been clearly attributed work done by the students and we have distinguished it from work done by others. The lab work is mainly attributed to senior students, with some materials supplied by our instructors, and the measurement of the concentration of cadmium through precisely physical methods was helped by HIT-Harbin. Our website designer is Li Yao. And the expenses including international travel, team registration, Giant Jamboree attendance and accommodation during our stay in US. was supported by Northeast Forestry University. Moreover, our project was partly supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC). Please incorporate the Team Page to evaluate our work.
• We have documented four new standard BioBrick Parts used in our project and submitted these parts to the iGEM Registry. See Parts

For a Silver Medal

• All the BioBrick Parts of our own design and construction were experimentally validated and they also worked as expected. Our detecting system based on the redesigned smt locus (containing two parts: BBa_K1509000 and BBa_K1509001) residing in the engineering bacteria is able to sensitively represent the content of Cd²⁺ (1-100μM) in 1-2 hours. Our Units can easily utilize and exhibits improved flexibility as a tool to detect Cd²⁺ which belongs to the toxical heavy metal ions. And we found the nanocrystals formed in our Units by using Transmission Electron Microscope to observe the flocculated bacteria. See Results
• We’ve documented the characterization of all our four parts in the Main Page section of those Parts’ Registry entry. See Parts to find all our four parts
• We’ve submitted our four functional parts to the iGEM Parts Registry.
• Concerning the coverage of knowledge about cadmium poisoning resulted from heavy metal contamination and the acceptability of our project, we designed several increasingly deepened questions for an online survey regarding the ethical issues of the biological resolution of the cadmium contamination, which was finalised under the direction of Daizong Cui, whose research area is environmental microbiology. We spread this e-questionnaire among families, friends, teachers, secondary school pupils and our fellow students. And the results and conclusions are listed in Human Practice/Survey. Besides, concerning the future application of our work, we paid a visit to Harbin Taiping sewage treatment plant. There we saw the real procedure of sewage treatment. We do hope that we did propose some ideas from the perspective of biological resolution, all concerning conceptions has been presented in our wiki\⊙v⊙/.

And For a Gold Medal

• And for a gold medal as described above, we chose the form of online questionnaire to find out how people in China were conscious of the seriousness of the cadmium pollution and if they had a general understanding of the recycling of them or not. In order to obtain the opinion from public on the ethical issues of the biological resolution on the cadmium contamination, we made sure the distribution of our e-questionnaire is among people of different ages. This survey do have a great influence on us,this is because not only the feedback gave us faith to continue our project, but also informed us that most respondents are worried most about the issue of biosafety,concerning the secondary pollution caused by the application of our reconstructed bacteria .According to this information, we optimize our project by designing the flocculating module, to some extent,which is a consideration of avoiding this problem in addition to easily collecting the nanocrystal. We do hope that our considerations in the ethics and application can inspire fellow teams with similar purposes in the future. Learn more in Project/Future application and Human Practice/Survey.