Synthetic biology is a fast moving interdisciplinary branch of biology and engineering. To educate the next generation of synthetic biology scientists, the International Genetically Engineered Machine competition was established. In the past ten years, many Chinese teams have participated in this event, but no thorough review and analysis have been carried out. In this paper, we collect a lot of the Chinese teams’ data and information from the iGEM website and analyzed the number of teams, the performance, and the parts contributed by these teams. We also carried out a detailed questionnaire analysis from more than 10 teams, about the budgets, the judges and etc. From these analysis, we provide some suggestions both to the iGEM headquarter and Chinese teams. We envision the iGEM competition will continue to promote the innovative education in China, especially for those undeveloped areas.

The number of Chinese teams in iGEM competition

In Figure 1, we catalogued the number of teams from the globe or from China. From the iGEM website data, we take the teams at the “Accepted” status as the officially teams participated in the iGEM competition. In 2007, there were 5 teams from China. They were Tianjing, USTC, Peking, Tsinghua and Taipei. But in 2016, there were 73 teams from China, which surpassed all the other countries in the iGEM competition. We also calculate the ratio of Chinese teams among all the teams, and we found that the ratio increased from 9.6 % (2007) to 26.8% (2016). It took 6 years to increase from 9.6% (2013) to 22% (2013), while it took 3 years to increase from 22% (2013) to 26.8% (2016).

Figure 1a The number of teams from the globe or China and the ratio of Chinese teams

We also sum up all the times that all the teams participated in iGEM competition, and we found that in the past 10 years, there were 303 teams from university or institution participated in the iGEM competition all together. We also place their numbers in different provinces, direct-controlled municipalities and special administrative districts. We found that most of the teams were still from the developed areas, indicating that the these teams participated early in the iGEM competition, and some universities had 2 or 3 teams in some years, further make the distribution of teams biased in the developed areas.

Figure 2a The number of Chinese universities or institutions and times of Chinese universities or institutions participated in the iGEM competition

The performance of Chinese teams in the medals

The gold, silver or bronze medals are awarded based on the quality of the project. All teams can achieve any one of these medals. After analyzed the increased number of Chinese teams in iGEM, we want to know the performance of Chinese teams in iGEM. We retrieved the medals data from the iGEM website. We found that the performance of Chinese teams is extraordinary, especially in the undergraduates group.

The total medals, especially the gold medals increased from 2007 to 2016 among Chinese iGEM teams. In 2007, the 5 teams got 5 gold medals, but in 2008, no gold metals. In 2016, there were 37 gold medals among Chinese teams, which indicated that the Chinese teams performed very well in the iGEM. To further get a glimpse into the performance of Chinese teams in iGEM, we analyzed the ratio of gold, silver, bronze and no medals among Chinese teams. We found that the gold medal ratio of Chinese teams had 3 troughs. They were 2008, 2011 and 2014. From 2011 to 2013, there were regional jamborees. From 2014 to 2016, all the teams participated in the Giant jamboree, but the high school teams were not awarded medals until 2014. We found that from 2011 to 2013, the gold ratio increased from 39.1% to 65.9%. From 2014 to 2016, the gold ratio increased from 40% to 50.7%. The analysis told us that Chinese iGEM teams can quickly adapt to the changed situation and judging criteria to get better results.

Discussion

Challenges for Chinese iGEM teams:

After analysis and discussion with many team leaders, instructors and advisors of Chinese iGEM teams, we found that several challenges must be faced for Chinese iGEM development. The first is the grant, since the cost of iGEM competition is huge. To secure and manage funding is an important task for each team. Second, the project usually has to be shift from one direction to the other direction, which is difficult for just one PI-centered lab. Third, the human practices of Chinese teams are still eye sight-narrowed, the spreading of science to the public is still constrained, and some activities are not carefully designed. Fourth, the national organization to coordinate different universities is still not established.

Some suggestions for Chinese iGEM teams

To face the challenges, here we want to provide some suggestions for Chinese iGEM teams. First, we think that a national organization should be established to coordinate the collaboration between different universities. An open course should be constructed to let more students can easily access to, which will help the students from the undeveloped areas to learn the SynBio courses. We think the grant should be diversified to make it stable. We also think that there should be a cross-discipline organization in each university to further support the students-led research.

Some suggestions for the iGEM headquarters

First, the iGEM headquarters should cooperate with the Ministry of Education of Asian countries, or the universities from Asian countries, to discuss the potential that being the judges of iGEM can be regarded as a form of “service for the society”, and the judge experience will be considered when these assistant or associate professor are evaluated for the promotion into associate professor or professor. With these motivations, the number of judges from Asian countries might be boosted in the following years.

Second, for those teams who fail to attend the Giant jamboree but accomplish all the tasks to win a medal, the iGEM headquarters should arrange video or live presentations to judge their work. For many reasons, some team might fail to get the VISA to attend the Giant jamboree. In nowadays, there is no difficulty in live presentations for the Internet and technology is mature enough and many commercial websites can offer these services. To be fair, the teams failed to attend the Giant jamboree can be classified into a special track, but their opportunity to win a medal should be reserved.

Third, the cost for registration fee of the team and the Giant jamboree is a little bit high. The registration fee is $4500 for a team and $695 each for to participate in the Giant jamboree. We think that the cost can be lowered to let more resources limited teams can also participate in this competition.

Fourth, the quality of parts is still not comfortable. Our suggestion is that the DNA sequencing results should be posted along with the part in the Registry.

a.Southwest Union

Having a deep cooperation with Southwest Union(iGEM meet-up in southwest China) last year, we viewed the meet-up an important role in our early-stage, thus, as soon as our project get mostly shaped, we discussed with SCU-WestChina about holding the Southwest Union meet-up of 2017. Together with the SCU-WestChina, SCU-China , UESTC-China and SICAU-China, we have an overall assessment of the safety and feasibility of our project and the latest trend of iGEM competition including the newly added judging terms, etc. What matters most was that all teams exchanged information and built a deeper relationship. Particularly, SICAU-China and SCU-WestChina shared us with their experience of facing the problem that working on a very similar project with quite a few teams, and we finally decided to keep our project to see what can we achieve.

b.XJTLU-China

This year, we aimed to build a quorum sensing tool kit based on the Agr system from the Gram-positive bacteria-- Staphylococcus aureus, while XJTLU-China happens to working on a quite similar project. However, we had difficulties synthesizing the genes agrC and agrA in plasmids, and therefore, the experiments were not able to conduct. Fortunately, XJTLU-China had the similar construction and provided us with their group I Staphylococcus aureus’ s agrC and agrA genes.

a.CCiC Conference:

As the competition approaches, the Central China iGEM Consortium (CCiC) conference was hosted by Fujian Agriculture and Forestry University (FAFU-China), in order to simulate the iGEM Giant jamboree and enhance further communication among different teams. This was a great opportunity to present our work and learn from the other 48 teams. It was nice to see that we did a good job in presentation and the audience was attracted by our project. The most important thing to us was that we harvested much useful advice from the judges, mentors and students. We made the best of the Panel Session and poster exhibition to establish collaborations with other teams. Interestingly, we were lucky to have deep conversations with Igem headquarter King L. CHOW and former iGEMer Zhang Haoqian, who encouraged us to go deeper in research and promote iGEM and synthetic biology research in our university. From the CCiC, we were aware of our current disadvantages in quantitative measurement and the overall logic, which laid a foundation for the later adjustments and improvements. More importantly, we made great acquaintance with many students and establish deep collaborations with teams with same interest, including ShanghaiTech University and Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University.

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