Team:CIEI-China/HP/Gold Integrated
We collected many food waste samples from different sources, i.e., school, family and the canteen. After the collection, we obtained diversified and a large amount of samples, which provides a strong support for us to build a more realistic and reasonable database. Then we sent the sample to Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences test the salt concentrations of the waste.
Besides the idea-exchange seminar we had with the experts in Institute of Zoology, Chinese Academy of Science, before the experiments in summer, in August and September we contacted many iGEM teams in China and invited them to attend the CGEM (China Genetically Engineered Machine) Forum in October, which is organized by our team together with CIEI-BJ.
On 4th, Oct. the First CGEM Forum was held in the meeting room “Reddish Lake” on the 4th floor of WenJin International Hotel. In respond to the invitation, two high-school teams (HFLS-H2Z-HangZhou and RDFZ-China) and one college team from Beijing institute of technology came to the forum. In total, more than 70 teachers and students attended the conference. Our team was in duty of welcoming, leading the people, setting the room, as well as doing signing up for visitors.
During the seminar, teams first gave presentations on their own topics on the stage; then, the professors provided advice and improvement directions from many aspects including topic (purpose, experiment design, influence, potential danger), power point (words, color, number of pages), and speech (content, volume, order of speaker, motion, time management). Dr. Li, Dr. Cheng and Dr. Xue kindly provided every team with suggestions and opinions.
Through communication with members in other teams after all speeches and comments were given, we gladly heard that they considered the forum as a useful chance to modify their own presenting process. “The suggestions from Dr. Wang made us jump out of the box easily and immediately came up with new idea about how to design our wiki,” said the leader of CIEI-Beijing, “quite amazing!” As an old saying goes “bystanders always know better”, the improvements mentioned by the professors, indeed, sparkled every single teammate’s mind, provoking them to find better solutions to their problems and move forward.
What’s more, idea-sharing seminar gave the forum members chances to exchange ideas about poster design and production, as well as listen to advice and stories from experienced professor, who is now running his personal bio-company.
In February, we brainstormed the idea of our project. During this time, we visited the Institute of Zoology and discussed with Dr. Wei, the expert of Conservation Genetics, for advice. We made clear of the prospection of idea with the professors; and they confirmed that our research topic will be very meaningful in the society and gave us some very useful suggestions.
On July 20th and 21st, 2017, our team took a field trip to Tsinghua University and Peking University to attend a meeting with instructors and their former iGEMers. We explained our project idea and they warmly offered us some specific suggestions in our experiment design and human practice. Informed that our attempt was to improve the salt resistance of the yeast and increase the efficiency of food waste disposal, they generously provided us some information from the former teams which had studied the similar project from a different perspective. After the communication, we had a pleasant dinner and appreciated their help. Then they offered their contact information to us, looking forward to our further improvement.
Because it is hard for us to have face to face communication with other teams, we had a We-chat communication group FAFU CCiC with them. This group consists many teams, like BIT-CHINA. We shared our idea with many college students, and they gave us many professional suggestions and kind help.
Several of our teammates gave the speeches in biology classes of Beijing 101 International Department and Beijing Changping New Oriental Foreign Language School. In every speech, we mainly introduced the history of iGEM, and how creative the match is—lots of innovation are originated from this match. Then, we introduced our project—how to effectively decompose the kitchen waste with low osmotic pressure (high salinity) osmotic pressure. We basically talked about the factors which can affect the efficiency or the ability of yeasts which are used to decompose the kitchen waste, and our own solution.
Our team members also introduced our project in the real life: they visited some companies which are related to biology and explained our project to them.We got the funding from Nanjing Zhengbeicehui Equipment Inc., Hunan Tianxingjian Project Management Inc., Shanghai Songyuan Cork Foam Inc., Beijing Shiyuan Business Inc., Kanglihua Company and Beijing Huaxiafengxing Advertisement Inc, etc. Through this practice, we not only challenged ourselves in negotiating with adults, especially the managers of some enterprises, but also expanded our influence in the society such as the marketplace.
We wrote an article on the internet to describe what synthetic biology and iGEM are, and what we were doing in our own research. The article attracted more than 100 net citizens to read. They browsed our webpage and got to know some details about our project. Many of them are really interested in our project; they not only donate money to support us, but also gave us many inspiring comments, which encouraged us a lot for further study.
Most of our family and community have no idea about the synthetic biology. We gave lectures to our parents and our neighbors. Most of people are confused with or held some wrong opinions about synthetic biology. Through our introduction and explanation, they realized that synthetic biology is not as horrible or scary as what they used to think. We changed their opinions, also taught them some basic knowledge of the synthetic biology that they have never thought of. We also helped many children understand that biology is really useful and interesting. We not only introduced our project, we also spread the influence of the synthetic biology and iGEM.
Our product can help the environment in three ways. First of all, with our modified yeast, food waste decomposition rate will be greatly increased, and then we no longer need to worry about the soil pollution which is brought by traditional kitchen waste digestion-landfill. As the amount of kitchen waste that is digested by landfill decline, salt and other toxicant will gradually stop entering into the soil. Secondly, after decomposition by our genetically modified yeast,, some of the useless kitchen waste might be efficiently changed into biological fertilizers. This type of biological fertilizer not only enhances crop production, but also can help the soil maintain a high fertility. Last but not least, burning of kitchen waste can be replaced by our decomposition method, which will effectively relieve the current unpleasant situation of air pollution.
Our project is aimed to increase the tolerance of yeast in hypertonic environments during food waste decomposition. With our modified yeast, survivability of yeast and their decomposing efficiency can be greatly increased. Currently, most of the companies have to add new yeast periodically to keep the decomposition rate. With the help of our yeast, the companies can save more costs by reducing the needs of large amount of yeast and increasing the decomposition efficiency.
Because of the effectiveness of our modified yeast in food waste decomposition, people will be able of enjoy a safer and more comfortable life in a fresh and clean environment without the negative effects caused by the food waste.
