Monthly

MARCH

We, totally strangers, were drawn by the recruiting poster on the board of our teaching building. After several rounds of selections, the blurry figure of our team was barely to be seen.During this month, our knowledge about iGEM was indeed an explosion.

APRIL

Although the team was growing, we didn’t know who we would be working with, the faces that were going to be the most familiar ones through the whole summer. This month, our future team was registered by our instructors. None of us knew how much that would mean to each of us and how far the young team would go.

Also in this month, we invited two previous iGEMers from Zhejiang University(Zukai Liu) and Natinal Chiao Tung University(Haoxian Wang) to communicate with us about the experience of building a team, selecting a track, running a project. We learned so much from them. For new iGEMers like us, it was really a great encouragement. Meanwhile, we were getting organized like they suggested, getting us scheduled for frequent communications in the team.

MAY

We wandered among previous wikis. Weekly meet-ups for brainstorms promoted us to bring up our own cases. Each time, we shared our information, results, problems and thoughts with each other and our instructors. It was not easy to form a new pattern of study, where we were totally free to go for or against others opinions rather than taught by just one teacher in the class. We finally could enjoy ourselves in this kind of free atmosphere.

JUNE

Instead of just glancing over other teams wikis, we urged ourselves to get some insights into those successful cases to seek every spark that might inspire us, followed by designing our own case in details.After several times of discussions and debates, we set our case in environment track and decided to do something about the heavy metal contamination. By the end of this month, the structure of our case was clear to see. Learn more about design.

And this month, we invited a special guest to join our conversation. Ph.D. Qian Wang, a Distinguished Professor of University of South Carolina. Fortunately for us, he brought us a wide range of knowledge about latest development in bionanomaterials, which really inspired us a lot. Here we send our best wishes for him and his research group!

Another big event in this month was that we demonstrated our project to the leaders of our school for more attention and additional fund. It was indeed a good opportunity for us to practice in front of an audience. And it turned out to be a success. We appreciated that we got a say through the whole progress. And we were happy that we won the favor of the leadership.

JULY

Nearly two thirds of our team members were not familiar enough to bioscience experiment as well as frequently used biotechnologies. So it was a big job for us to adapt to the wet lab work. We started from laboratory safety education, including the microbiological risk assessment, laboratory-biosafety level, laboratory equipment, microbiological techniques and chemical, fire and electrical safety on the basis of Laboratory Biosafety Manual and then equipped ourselves with basic experimental routes and qualified techniques according to Molecular Cloning: A Laboratory Manual.

AUGUST

For the competition, the result we harvested in this month should be the critical part of the whole project, without which we would be stuck at the very beginning. This was the achievement of getting the reconstructed bacteria we need containing the designed plasmids.See more about Lab Note

Then we began to conduct system testing when the designed plasmids were ready.

On 20th, we attended 2014 International Workshop and Summer School on "Biological Big Bytes", a Satellite Meeting of the International Workshop/Summer school on Crops, Chips & Computers(C3-B3 for short). It was combined with the iGEM Meet-Up for three teams in Harbin, China(HIT-Harbin, NEAU-Harbin and us) and it was organized by Harbin Institute of Technology. Here we want to express our sincere thanks for them!

This month we also visited Harbin Taiping sewage treatment plant to learn the technological process of sewage treatment and to do some samplings so that we could test our system.

Besides that, this month we designed a questionnaire about the Chinese public opinion about ethical issues of the heavy metal contamination and our project. Then, our online survey was opened from 26^th to 30^th and was completed by 185 respondents.

SEPTEMBER

It was very tight for us to complete the system testing work, but we overcame it at last with some volunteers in lower grades. And we edited our subsequent wet lab work into mainly three sections: Detecting, Recycling and Flocculating(as a benchmark for ourselves about future application). In addition to continue testing our constructed system, we also completed the parts shipping this month. We submitted four unique parts. They were BBa_K1509000, BBa_K1509001, BBa_K1509002 and BBa_K1509003. Learn more in Parts

Besides, thanks to our web designer, our logo and slogan were born on the end of this month, followed by our self-designed long-sleeved shirts.

OCTOBER

Time’s fleeting. On the basis of seven months work, we are finally able to do the subsequent work. This month, we were busy creating and sharing the description of our team's project using the iGEM wiki. And just like the progress from a script to a movie, our wiki changed from one edition to another.

Creating poster was another big job in this month so that we would be prepared to communicate our project with others in a very concise, yet engaging manner just like the official website of iGEM required.

This will be our debute in the iGEM competition, also in the Giant Jamboree. We absolutely expect our best performance in Boston. So the last job is to get fully prepared for the presentation in the Giant Jamboree . We employ our spare time for practicing our oral English. We wish to present our project to all of you and most importantly, to share our conceptions for a better future.