Team:LZU-China/hp

        We have designed a questionnaire to survey the masses' attitude toward sewage treatment, power generation, and MFCs. This questionnaire was made up by 16 questions and the respondents are random selected by all ages, genders and positions in China and U.K. 

Complete the survey Students are taught to complete the survey made by our own.

        We have found that in China, 68.23% of the respondents believe that they suffer from water pollution and 15.38% of them think their hometown is seriously polluted. But in U.K., surprisingly, 70.59% of the people believe that they do not suffer from any kind of water pollution. This interesting phenomenon appears in London (which we initially thought the water was serious polluted by industry long times ago), all of the respondents from London think that the water, for example in Thames, was clean and clear.

        People show hesitation towards sewage treatment using bacteria. 32.31% of the Chinese respondents can fully accept the recycled water using bacteria. For 64.62% of them, recycled water using bacteria is not drinkable but it is acceptable for toilet flushing. When gene modified bacteria involved, this number is decreased to 61.54%. Obviously, 9.23% of the Chinese people refuse to using this kind of water and even 3.08% of them fight against gene modified gem using for sewage treatment. This situation is similar in U.K. 

        Things have changed in Microbial Fuel Cells, Thermo power are the main power supply for China and UK (although most of the Englishmen do not know that.  These two countries, although located in different continents, share different incomes and outcomes, demonstrates a similar trend about MFC. Over 84.62% of Chinese think that the electric bill is not expensive and 82.35% of Britain respondents hold the same view.

        78.46% of the respondents in China believe that it is necessary for their own country to develop the use of MFCs, in U.K., this number is 52.94%. Overall, many people doubt it is safe to drink the water purified by bacteria, but they are still optimistic to the future of MFCs.  

        We have held a number of presentations to introduce fundamental knowledge of synthetic biology, iGEM competition and the program we would complete ourselves to students studying in different grades and majors.Those lectures made hundreds of students understand the basic principle of MFCs, and the prospect of using MFCs to solve the environmental problems.

        In addition, our team attended several meetups, we joined CCiC (Central China iGEMers’ Consortium) hold in Central China Agricultural University, Wuhan, China. The conference aims to help teams improve performance in the 2014 iGEM competition, arouse awareness of intra-regional collaboration so as to enhance better communication among iGEM teams in China by establishing the CCiC. We listened to the reports given by peer groups shared our ideas with them as well in August.

Xiao Zhang was introducing our work in the CCiC meetups. During the CCiC iGEMer Meetups, LZU-China gave the plenary lecture to all the participants. And this lecture was critically acclaimed by a lot of specialists and students.

Shengcang Zhu and Xuejing Du are listening to the lecture in CCiC. Not only for our group but also other groups gave their experimental reports in CCiC so we learned a lot from others.

        In October, we went to Beijing to visit another team-BIT and cooperated with them.

Conference photo of LZU-China and BIT interlaboratory cooperation. In October, there was an interlaboratory cooperation between LZU-Chia and BIT in Beijing.

        Cooperation with other scientific institutions is also which we took part in: we went to Membrane Science and Technology Research Institute of Gansu Province, CNPC for study, and even went to countryside to investigate the condition of water pollution.

Our cooperations These are our friend cooperations, thanks to their help!.

Foreign experts We invited experts from other country to give us lectures.

Song's rural survey Liyang Song went to one small village the investigate the local water condition