Team:SSTi-SZGD/HP/Silver
SSTi-SZGD
We visited a team member, Richard's hometown in a village of Western Guangdong province. By talking to his family and friends, who are farmers for generations, we discovered that chemical fertilizers were heavily used in the field. The reason behind was that the soil has been severely contaminated by overdose usage of pesticide, causing land agglomeration and deprivation of soil nutrients. The natural way for pesticide degradation in soil is through land plowing and pause farming for years. However, ordinary farmers would not want to wait, instead they continue with more chemical fertilizers and more pesticides. That’s where the vicious cycle begins.
We talked to professionals in the agricultural field about our project proposal and feasibility of our technology. In the meantime, we traveled to a number of places in Guangdong province to investigate how widespread the problem is, and how our proposed products could help. By talking to farmers, farmers, garden owners, government officials, we understood better about their needs. In addition, we visited LEVEKING Biotech, one of the leading enzyme providers in Southern China, to find out how we could commercial our proposed product. Check out what we did this whole year on Outreach and Integrated HP pages!
We conducted a survey on how people thought of pesticide residues and how they would respond to using genetic modification organisms for pesticide degradation purpose. We also developed an APP that helps detecting pesticide residues on food products and educating people on relevant information and regulations. Check out our Outreach and Software pages!
We spent monthly in the laboratory to experiment on our designated light-regulated enzyme production system. Thanks to the help of our collaborated iGEM teams (check out Collaboration page), our ideas were extended and techniques were improved to provide a solid technical foundation for the commercialization of the project. We thoroughly investigated the elements that may affect the viability of our products, and spent hours and hours writing and editing a business proposal to integrate information from various parties. Key pointed we considered included product design, environmental impact, potential customers identifications, industrial production procedures, financial cost analyses, promotion strategies, etc. For more info., check out our Applied Design and Business Plan pages!
We engaged with our friends and stakeholders through the social media by periodically updated on what we had been up to. By doing so, we attracted more attention on our project, and hope that would transfer to a way that helps improving soil conditions in China. On the other hand, In order to realize the project, we participated in a number of entreprenuership competitions throughout the year. We got lucky to receive a RMB￥50,000 (USD$7460) start-up fund by making to the 1st on one of the competitions! We completed the registration of a Bio-tech company this seeded money lately. Check out our Outreach page for a full description!
This is the first time ever for our school to participate in iGEM competition. We spent almost the entire year preparing for the competition, it has been a mix of sweet and sour experience, challenging yet excited!! We hope that more of our fellow students would join this competition in the future so we actively promoted iGEM and synthetic biology in various occasions at our school. The response was fascinating! Hope we will receive more thrilling ideas and also, hope new blood would help moving our project further. Check out Outreach page.
