Freshwater Bioremediation Alliance

The Freshwater Bioremediation Alliance (FBA) was initiated by Nanjing_NFLS and XJTLU-CHINA, and consists of seven teams:

Nanjing_NFLS: from Nanjing Foreign Language School

XJTLU-CHINA: from Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University

Nanjing-China: from Nanjing University

CHINA-FAFU : from Fujian Agriculture and Forestry University

GXU-China: from Guangxi University

UM_Macau: from Macau University

NPU-CHINA: from Northwestern Polytechnical University

All the partner teams devote this year’s project to water environment protection, which is the foundation of the alliance. Collectively, we aim at offering a platform for communication and cooperation between member teams, making substantial impact in providing quality information for the public, and contributing documented experiences for future teams’ reference.

The basis of our alliance was various workshops to share and discuss each teams’ target problems and corresponding solutions. Teams started to be acquainted with each other since the ice breaking meetup, during which we exchanged our project ideas and proposed some cooperation ideas. FBA’s collaboration deepened with our Biosafety Panel Discussion: each team shared their specific methods to prevent bacteria leakage or possible harms to the environment, and different approaches became inspiration for others. We also consulted water environment experts to further figure out appropriate solutions, and the professional opinions helped each team form a more comprehensive proposal of implementation.

“I was truly getting new perspectives on bioremediation with each team’s project. The focuses and designs come in such a variety because of the topic’s interdisciplinary nature, and learning the projects designed at college level was both eye-opening and humbling for us high school students. We are very grateful to share this iGEM season with teams with a common goal of a better water environment.”

——Youran Zhao, Human Practices leader of Nanjing_NFLS

Collaboration with CHINA-FAFU

On world environment day, we joined CHINA-FAFU’s forum as a guest speaking team. The goal of the forum was to raise awareness on environment issues, especially freshwater and marine ecology, by teams introducing their targeted problems and researchers speaking on recent advances.

On this conference, we introduced our project to tackle the microcystin pollution, and shared our opinion on the importance of water environment protection. We also had the opportunity to learn latest water protection methods presented by professors from Tsinghua University, Minjiang University, and Fujian Agriculture and Forestry University.

With the help of this platform, we were able to reach a broad audience: students from middle school to graduate school, communities invited by each school, concerned listeners all around China. We are honored to join CHINA-FAFU on this amazing event, and to together raise awareness on water environment protection.

Partnership with XJTLU-CHINA

XJTLU-CHINA is a collegiate team aiming to eliminate heavy metal ions from freshwater environments. We share a common focus in water environment protection, and our projects have similar potential implementations. Throughout this season, we partnered up in various stages, including:

Earlier Stage:

Environment Policy Review

Middle Stage:

Co-Design Survey

Freshwater Bioremediation Alliance

Modeling Mentorship & Feedback

Later Stage:

Market Plan

View more details in Partnership page!

Nanjing High School Meetup

We joined NFLS_Nanjing, Worldshaper-Nanjing, and Worldshaper-NJBIOX for a meetup in Nanjing. All these teams had high school students from our city Nanjing, and we share a lot in common – school, curriculum, and experience with synthetic biology.

On this meetup with leaders from each team, we first introduced each team’s project in both wet lab and dry lab. From the presentations, we found that we encountered similar problems – lack of access to labs, little prior knowledge on synbio and experiments, and difficulty hosting outreach activities (and being taken seriously). Despite the circumstances, each team has made substantial impact this season: Worldshaper-Nanjing showed us their educational comic book, Worldshaper-NJBIOX and NFLS_Nanjing introduced their respective discussions with academia, and we shared our experience initiating the Freshwater Bioremediation Alliance as the only high school team.

We then reflected on the current situation of biology education in schools. Throughout each team’s outreach, we found a lack of basic knowledge in everyday biology among the general public – which is not surprising, because our textbooks did not put much emphasis on how the abstract science is related to our daily lives. However, this information is key for people to make informed decisions about products and policies relating to themselves.

Therefore, we decided to host a community education event to address these issues. We’re excited to join our peers in this effort!

Conference of China iGEMer Community (CCiC)

The 9th Conference of China iGEMer Community (CCiC) was online with 85 participating teams that were divided into tracks according to the iGEM official categorization. In the conference, we shared our project with other iGEM teams and experts in synthetic biology with our poster. Through discussion with collegiate teams that had previous experience in environmental protection, we came up with the structure for our follow-up experiments to analyze the interaction between our bacteria and algae. Moreover, we learned about different kinds of hardware design from teams’ presentations. This proved to be very helpful in our later stages involving hardware design.

From the workshops held by experts and professionals, we expanded our knowledge in general synthetic biology, its intriguing applications, and potentials in the near future. The 9th CCiC was an amazing experience bonding with teams around China!