OUC-CHINA IGEM, a team of 11 undergraduate students, was recently, awarded the silver medal for the International Genetically Engineered Machine Competition (IGEM), and an individual prize for Interlab Study at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the U.S. 

This was another remarkable achievement for OUC-CHINA IGEM having won the gold medal for Asia in 2012 and 2013 and the bronze medal in 2014. 

The members of the 2015 OUC-CHINA IGEM team were Lian, Jie, Mu, Qingdian, Qin, Qikai, Liang, Jinyang, Shang, Renjie, and Pan, Zhuo from the College of Marine Life Sciences, Zhang, Xihan and Wei, Ruifan from the College of Food Science and Engineering, Wei, Cun from the Fisheries College, Chen, Weiyan from the College of Mathematical Science, and Zhang, Weina from the College of Engineering.

The team was supervised by Professor Yang, Guanpin and Associate Professor Wang, Yan from the College of Marine Life Sciences, with the help of the Experimental Teaching Center of Marine Life Sciences, the Innovation and Practice Lab., and the Innovative and Venture Base of OUC. It was self-organized, self-managed and topics were self-selected.

The title for the OUC team’s entry was “Magthermo Coli”, a technology which controls gene expressions of Escherichia coli by alternating magnetic field. Ferritin is formed within E. coli,cells, which means that the modified bacteria can synthesize magnetic nanoparticles. Such nanoparticle generates heat once being triggered by magnetic field, then the temperature-sensing elements (RNA thermometer and T7 polymerase) respond to temperature change, regulating the expression of downstream genes.

A total of 280 teams from world famous universities participated in the IGEM competiton, including Harvard University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford University, Peking University, Tsinghua University, Taiwan University, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, the University of Tokyo, Kyoto University, the Korean University among others.

Translated by Barry YU

Proofread by SeanOg McKiernan and William ZOU