In order to learn much about the use of antibiotics in actual animal breeding, as well as the advantages and disadvantages for the most commonly used methods to detect antibiotic residue , we have a visit to the school's farm. Under the guidance of some graduate mentorships and administrators, we understand the current situations of the bases well, such as the sheep, pigs, cattle breeding base.

      We first interviewed the graduate student who is responsible for the farm. He told us that the process of feeding cattle does not need antibiotics, due to that the cattle are ruminants and need gut microbes to help them digest fodder. When we talked about other animals fed in this farm, such as pig and sheep, he said the feeders generally use the antibiotic premix and the amount of antibiotics added in fodder varies with different animals. Normally, they will use method ELISA to detect antibiotic residues. But now this method exists many shortcomings especially the insensitive response and the long cycle.

      We learned condition about the use of antibiotics in animal feed by taking an interview with an interviewer and visiting the Food and Drug Administration. Due to low prices of antibiotics, it is used a lot in the feeding of animals. Adding antibiotics to the fodder can inhibit growth of the pathogens in animals and reduce animal mortality. However, the problems of animal disease is getting more complicated and the situation of antibiotics residue becomes more serious. On the one hand, we need to spend a lot of energy to treat the difficult animal diseases. On the other hand , antibiotics residue flowed to the environment may cause a large number of resistant bacteria multiply, with polluting the surrounding water at the same time.
      Now, using Liquid Chromatography to detect antibiotics is mainly applied, which costs high and takes a long time. Meanwhile, we exchanged our projects with the teachers and technical staffs. According to our survey results, using microbiological means to detect antibiotics has great significance, which reduces the reliance on precision instruments and lowers the detection costs significantly.

      We present Synthetic biology to biology professional students on professional courses every year. It is an opportunity to introduce this emerging subject to those students learning biology. There is no synthetic biology course in our school, but we hold to talk about interesting project designs, aiming to inspire more people to know synthetic biology and join it.
      We introduce the history of synthetic biology development, the sophisticated design, and some meaningful projects, like using E. coli as a test tool to detect contaminants in the environment. We hope these efforts could promote people’s comprehension of synthetic biology.
      This practice makes Synthetic biology come into more students’ vision no matter what they major in. More and more people are interested in Synthetic biology and join us in this way.