Team:OUC-China/HumanPractice

Human practice

Fig.1 An aerial view of Qingdao's Enteromorpha outbreak.

This year our project was inspired by our local environmental problem in Qingdao, which located along the coastline of Yellow Sea in China. From June to August every year, a large quantity of floating Enteromorpha appeared offshore in Qingdao. Every year, the government will fund the disposal of Enteromorpha. Statistics show that Enteromorpha's annual salvage can reach up to 70000 tons. Still, a huge amount of Enteromorpha was not utilized fully after salvage, which mainly turned into fodder. Therefore, our goal is to find a better way to maximize the utilization of seaweed residue.

Meanwhile, we are concerned with the world energy crisis, in which bioenergy is one of the main renewable energy sources of human development that can be of great help. Therefore, we hope to transform the algae fiber into bioenergy and make a modest effort to help deal with the world energy crisis considering the overgrown Enteromorpha. Inheriting the spirits of iGEM Organizing Committee, our project comes from the social environmental problem and would give feedback to society in the way of energy producing and education. That is just how society affects our work and how our work affects society.

We have done a full human practice this year. It can be summed up as three perspectives, inspired by society, contacts with society and feedback to society as well as a communication and cooperation section.

Fig 2. Pictures that taken during human practices.

Achievements

★Through the work of human practice, we did plenty of research about Enteromorpha's current condition, application, and related study，we successfully fed the results back to our lab and modify our project designs.
★We successfully linked our projects to real production！To combine our projects with real energy production, we visited Qingdao Seawin Group and established a partnership with them.
★We carefully confirmed that our work is safe and is of no harm to the environment and society and dig deep into the society for inspiration.
★We spread iGEM spirits and promoted the development of synthetic biology in China through popular science brochure, synthetic biology lecture, summer camp, and social media.
★We participated in various kinds of synthetic biology forum such as Conference of China iGEMer Community (CCiC), Synthetic Biology Young Scholar Forum.

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