Team:UESTC-China/our-story
Our story
With the rapid development of agriculture and industry on the earth, there is a group of demons haunting us. They are industrial and agricultural by-product or abandoned waste. They wander aimlessly in the mountains, rivers and farmland, nibbling away our Mother Nature inch by inch. In silence, they destroy the environment that humanity relies on. The fiend called TCP leads to organic pollutants which spreading quickly around the world. TCP is similar to a vicious cancer cell, which can easily grow out of control. ( What is TCP? )
However, there is an old saying in China: What is done by night appears by day. One day TCP's devastated impact will be revealed to the world. Scientists gradually find traces of TCP and record types of organic pollutants. Then they officially declared a war on them. They are making firm progress in the process of defeating organic pollutants. Almost all of them are forced to withdraw all their troops beneath the ground. Under the ground, the devil named TCP continues its wickedness. Because the Lord TCP’s army of organic pollutants are buried so deep in the underground world (soil, groundwater) that people often do not pay enough attention to them. So severity of pollution in soil and groundwater is much higher than we expected (even many people don't know that is pollution). This is a very c time for Earth's future! A group of warriors from Sichuan, Chengdu, China, spontaneously organized a team against the TCP fiend. ( Our team )
Firstly, these warriors investigated the situations of domestic and foreign TCP pollution, found that TCP is indeed, distributed in many parts of the earth, and the status quo is not optimistic. ( What poll did we do? )
Because TCP is buried under the soil, traditional methods can’t eliminate them effectively. So how do we solve this difficult problem? We turned to plants for help. We want to extract enzymes that could decompose pollutants from roots of plants. Using these enzymes, TCP can be degraded into glycerol. In the end, we hope to create a strain of super plants through gene engineering and grant a better future for our offspring and posterity.
The warriors devoted themselves to the manufacturing super plants day and night. In order to make super seedlings grow into a more powerful plant, our footprints covered all over the world. We communicated with synthetic biology experts and experts in other fields and iGEM counterparts, and incorporated their proposed ideas into the project. ( What did we communicate? )
We fell over obstacles for many times, but bounce back from failure again and again. Finally, hard work pays off. Super plants are beginning to take shape. In the laboratory, plants can function as TCP degradation agents. However, it does not mean that they will be able to defeat the TCP fiend in a situation that is much more complex. So iGEMers produced a series of plans to find the best solution to degrade TCP under various circumstances. ( What have we done to prove that? )
While we are making super plants, we still want to know whether people are aware of soil pollution or not but the result is disappointing. We also find that if we want to turn things around, only by scientific efforts we have made is far from enough. We also hope that more people from all walks of life would be concerned about land pollution problems. We hope that all sectors of society would cultivate this awareness. ( What did we do? )
Until now, super plants have been playing a dominant role in recent confrontation with TCP. When optimizing these super plants, we also hope to cooperate with other iGEMers and help them solve more problems, and let everyone have a access to iGEM's scientific achievements. ( What kind of cooperation did we have? )
