Achievements

BRONZE

we have registered our teamTeam List

We have set up a team wiki

We have completed the judging form

We have prepared a poster and a presentation, which we will be presenting at the Jamboree.

We have designed several new biobricksSee Parts...

we have completed the safety form

we have created a page on our team wiki with clear attribution of each aspect of our project

we participated in the Interlab Measurement Study and met all the Interlab Requirement. You can see the result here See InterLab...

SILVER

Several of our BioBricks work as expected. For example, Bbaxxxxxx, and they had been submitted as required.

We have mentored a high school team (HFLS_H2Z_Hangzhou)and we designed a special linker for their core proteins and constructed the plasmid for them. We also helped them standardized this part.

We considered topics like biosafety and ecological. We invited Prof.Chulong Zhang as our instructor, who has focused on Trichoderma for tens of years. He recommended Trichoderma atroviride for us as the chasis which is safe and environment-friendly. We also consulted him how to prevent our engineered Trichoderma from horizontal gene transfer.

GOLD

Tobacco is an important economic crop in the global world. In China, the planting area of tobacco can reach 16 million mu (about 10600 km²).  In 2015, the GDP(Gross Domestic Product) in China is totally 676,70 billion yuan, while the cigarette sales reached 142,2 billion yuan to 4.7% of the total retail sales of consumer goods was 300,93 billion yuan. This shows that tobacco has high economic value.

However, due to the black shank caused by Phytophtora, tobacco yield reduces a lot every year. In China, Hunan province, there’s nearly 2.5 million mu of tobacco planting area. There are 5%-10% tobacco affected by the disease each year. Through a simple calculation, the whole country loses nearly 100 billion yuan of tobacco in a single year. The traditional method for control is spraying pesticide in all the plant in the certain field after tobacco infected black bank is found. Nevertheless, the sicken rate is stabilize at 5%-10%. In another word, the traditional method shows a lot of defects in cost and effect.

Therefore, we chose tobacco as our testing plants.

We engaged with stakeholders as well as experts,and did field study etc., which as a whole helped us to design and modify our project. We visited China National Tobacco Corporation(CNTC) to investigate the damage caused by tobacco black shank, and the staff of CNTC gaved us lots of helpful suggestions.

We have induced several site-mutation in the sequence of T7 promoter and in this way,we created a series of promoters with different strength. We believe that these promoters will provide the researcher with more freedom to select the promoter with a proper strength. It can be a great improvement for T7 promoter.

Through logistic regression analysis of the VOC released from healthy or infected tobacco,we constructed a model to tell the physiological state of tobaccos according to the VOC they released. It also helped us to select the four practical VOC sensors from 18 of candidates.

Our engineered trichoderma has shown its magicl power in fighting with Phytophthora parasitica var．nicotianae and in boosting the growth of nicotiana.