OUC-China, an iGEM team from Ocean University of China (OUC), won the bronze medal in the world final of the International Genetically Engineered Machine Competition (iGEM) that recently concluded in Boston, the United States.
OUC-China is composed of 15 undergraduate students from the College of Marine Life Sciences, the College of Fisheries, the School of Mathematical Sciences, and the College of Information Science and Engineering. Supported by the Research Innovation Lab of National Marine Life Sciences Experimental Teaching Demonstration Center and OUC Innovation and Entrepreneur Incubation Base, the team runs in the form of self-organization and self-management, and it independently decides its research projects.
The team made careful preparations all the way from literature retrieval, brainstorming, project selection, determination of the project, plan design, summary of results, to demonstration before going to America. Their project of this year is “Plasmid Adventure,” which develops the new path for the transfection of prokaryotic plasmid in living animals with synthetic biology methods, bringing about the transient expression of an objective gene within the zebrafish.
Through the exchanges and discussions with their peers from the best universities in the world, they expand their international perspective and demonstrate the spirit of OUC students.
IGEM, initiated by Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2003, was aimed at promoting the development of synthetic biology and has become a world top science competition for university students, drawing over 100 teams from worldwide famous universities.
In 2014, 245 teams from over 40 countries participated in the competition, including those from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard University, Cambridge University, and Stanford University. The number of teams from Asia reached 57.
Besides OUC, teams from China include Peking University, Tsinghua University, Science and Technology University of China, Zhejiang University, Fudan University, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Wuhan University, and Tianjin University also participated.
