Part 1：From Parts To the Engineered Biolego System

1.1 Team construction

In December, 2013 , pre-members of Nanjing-china(2013) gave an introduction lecture about synthetic biology and IGEM. About 100 students participated in the lecture. In order for students to get a deeper understanding of synthetic biology and for team leader to select new members, more academic lectures were launched during this time. By a vivid description of our previous work, we attracted students from different majors to learn about a new synthetic biology world.
1.2 Brainstorms

Once we set the Nanjing-China team, our team members did a hard work in determining the final project. We pointed out at least 60 ideas and make many discussion about different opinions. We think about the safety, value, feasibility and so on in the round.
For Environment has always been a concern in the field of biological research. Especially for synthetic biology, we all choose to put our efforts in the environment governance. Although synthetic biology brings many benefits to our lives, as far as some people concerned, some pollutants that demonstrate serious environmental and ecological problems still can not be removed. we devote ourselves in the project to solve this kind of problem.

1.3 Team Communication- Qinghua university, National Chiao Tung University and Jilin university shared the idea on team management.

We visit the Qinghua University for more team communication. From July 15 to 18, our team exchanged two team members with Qinghua University iGEM team in order to help and communicate with each other. During the time, Qinghua University team members give some advice in our research modeling and we also shared the idea on team management.

We are still invited to join the International Genetically Engineered Machine Conference at National Chiao Tung University from August 3rd to 7th 2014.This conference is not a simple warm-up for the upcoming world championship at Boston, but also an Asian regional platform for teams from different countries to exchange ideas and explore synthetic biology. We participated the conference and gave a presentation about our project. Excitements are guaranteed as each team is able to make new friends while learning from each other. During the meeting, the teams had a heated discussion over their topics and exchanged their ideas on how to tackle the problems. Both of the teams gained a lot from communicating with each other.

Last but not least, we help the Jilin university iGEM team to teat and verify the usability and function of the enzyme mlrD and send them the synthetized enzyme. We hope the two teams will have outstanding performances in the competition.

1.4 Requirement for our system
Identifying our application space and gaining a better understanding of our system has helped to guide our future work. We have come to realize that our system must have three main components to be most useful:
1、 The sensitive and specific promoter or riboswitch of the target toxins or molecules.
2、 The functional and high quality enzyme to bind or degrade target toxins or molecules.
For the further application of our system ,we decide to set two libraries.one of the library is to provide the known promoter and functional enzyme, the other library is about the method for people to design the riboswitch from the aptamers.

Click HERE to download a pdf version of our library

1.5 Specific application for our team system and the development of the system
To gain a deep understanding of the system, our research could play in the toxin engineering field, we hopes to create E.coli based therapies for toxin cleaning and design a product to be spread in the environmental industry. Some environmental institution may become our potential collaborator to help us extent our project.

Part 2：Publicity Efforts

2.1 Education(Introductive video)

2.1.1 Speaking to lowerclassmen at Nanjing University The Nanjing-China iGEM Team had a chance to present and talk to fellow underclassmen at Nanjing University about synthetic biology at an academic salon. It is an introductory seminar designed to give freshmen and sophomores a glimpse of the broad selection of synthetic biology. Through the presentation we were able to give our fellow peers an insight to what synthetic biology is, and help instill interest to inspire students to take up the field of synthetic biology.

2.1.2 Communication with high school students

Teenagers are the future of the synthetic biology. To get more students motivated in this field, we organized a synthetic biology workshop for 10 students from High School. On October 11, the Nanjing-China iGEM Team gave a presentation of their project to a group of 10 high school students. The team show the high school students around the Nanjing University and the laboratory that we did experiments. We give them a brief introduction about iGEM and showed them how synthetic biology worked by using several basic molecular biology experiments. In addition, the students actively participated in a discussion and had a meaningful afternoon discussing of their opinions in research and synthetic biology afterwards. After the lecture and conducting experiments themselves, those high school students showed great interest in synthetic biology and strong desire to participate in the iGEM themselves. The team hopes that they have got some creative yet applicable advice, and wishes to see more inspired group of students entering Nanjing University in the future.

2.2 Outreach to the Non-technical community
As part of an ongoing thrust to introduce synthetic biology to the community at large outside of research universities, our team made a display to the people that know little about synthetic biology.we tried to attract their attention to the biology.We give them a brief introduction about iGEM and showed them how synthetic biology worked by using several basic molecular biology examples.

Click HERE to download the video.

2.3 Collaboration within the academic and igem community
In order to further extend the influence of IGEM, We are trying to build an academic community- iGEM community in Nanjing university for biology lovers especially igem lovers in our school.