Team:HiZJU-China/Judging
Our own evaluation for medal
Bronze Medal Criteria
Silver Medal Criteria
Gold Medal CriteriaAt least three (3) criteria must be met:
We compete for the following special prizes.
Best Education
We could never have guessed how far our Education and Communication efforts were going to be. Our initial aim was to show how synthetic biology can play a major role in environmental governance. However, we soon understood that different groups of people have different levels of awareness of our project background, which meant the communication vector could not be the same depending on the public we wanted to target. So, we diversified our communication media from conferences to webinars, from online survey to science communication, from supporting education to intervention in class, always bearing in mind that our aim is to make more people aware of new pollutants and synthetic biology in an accessible way. We were rewarded above our expectations. In fact, our efforts to combine synthetic biology and environmental governance have received the attention and recognition of many people, not only from the public, but also from the scientific community. We believe this is only the beginning, the combination of environmental protection and synthetic biology will eventually flourish.
For more details, check out our Educational Engagement page!
Best Hardware
Our team aims to demonstrate the content of EE2 with portable readout as fluorescence intensity, which demands suitable hardware design. There are three specifications of detection devices: Civil detection, High throughput 96-well plates testing equipment for laboratory, and estrogen degradation model of sewage treatment plant. Civil detection is handy and portable while the high-throughput 96-well plate is experimenter-friendly, response swiftly, and no need for large samples. Additionally, considering the main resource of contaminants is sewage, we constructed the sewage treatment plant model. It can be taken by the city government.
For more details, check out our Hardware page!
Best Integrated Human Practices
This year, we had to take our Integrated Human Practices effort to a whole new level, and the feedback we got helped shape our project. On the one hand, we contact stakeholders in many fields (environment, education, business, synthetic biology, industrial processes, etc) according to the up & downstream framework. They offered us a lot of solutions to the questions we put forward and also convinced by our project. We felt it was equally essential to carefully transcribe the process in our wiki so that future iGEMers could refer to it. We also recorded the adjustment process of the project under the guidance of integrated human practice. We hope you will have as much pleasure browsing our IHP as we had to complete it.
For more details, check out our IHP page!
Safety and Security Award
We have strict strain storage regulations and rigorous experimental records. In addition to conventional laboratory safety requirements, we design a kill switch for practical application. It will express MazF and make the engineering bacteria die automatically when the EE2 is completely degraded. The complex of EE2 and estrogen receptor (ER) binds to estrogen response element(ERE) in the promoter and initiates the expression of cⅠDN and cⅠ. CⅠDN, a mutant of CI repressor, increased the affinity to non-specific DNA binding site. When the transcription starts, more CⅠDN molecules are present compared to CI molecules. Therefore, most of the monomers will form heterodimers with CⅠDN, and there will be no CI2 to activate PRM promoter. When EE2 concentration changes, the degradation tag is added with CⅠDN to ensure quick degradation of the monomeric proteins and CI2 will activate PRM promoter leading to the expression of mazF.
For more details, check out our Safety page!
Sustainable Development Impact
Please check out our SDI page!
