Team:CIEI-China/HP/Silver
Since the beginning of 2017, a group of young people who are interested in synthesis biology came together. We are from different places in the world, from China to America, form eastern hemisphere to western hemisphere. We held the winter and summer camp, by convening 15 young teenagers together. We brainstormed and discussed to design our project. We worked together closely to collect samples, conduct the experiments, raise funding, and finally fulfill our target.
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 students from their former iGEM teams. We explained our project idea and they warmly offered several 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 who had studied the similar project from a different perspective.
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 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 Tsinghua University 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.
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.
We found some donors to raise the funds. We wrote an article on the internet to describe what synthetic biology and iGEM are, and to introduce our own project. 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 played a role in promoting the influence of the synthetic biology and iGEM to the society.
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.
