Team:SCAU-China
Our team has been working on the iGEM-2016 project for two years. In this project, we used a crop plant rice (Oryza sativa L.) as chassis organism to produce a genetically modified organism (GMO) named aSTARice, which is able to produce astaxanthin in the rice endosperm. To achieve this goal, four genes derived from maize, algae, and bacteria respectively were expressed in transgenic rice driven by endosperm-specific promoters.
In the past two years, we have successfully held several public activities such as open laboratory day and a Bauhinia Scientific and Cultural Festival in our university, which attracted around hundreds and thousands of people to visit a laboratory of molecular biology, to understand how a GMO is generated in the lab.
During the period of our project, we gave several biology courses for middle school students, kids and farmers on knowledge about modern agriculture in the ruler countryside in our province. Thereby, we promoted the knowledge of synthetic biology and impact of iGEM in human practices.
Achievements
1. We have used rice (Oryza sativa) as a chassis organism to establish a bioreactor, which enables biosynthesis of astathanxin in rice endosperm.
2. The experiences and BioBricks we developed are helpful for future iGEM teams or labs working in other plants.
3. The heterogenous genes in our parts have been codon-optimized for plants.
4. We use Cre/loxp site-specific recombination method to achieve selection marker-free transgenic plants.
5. Our results demonstrated that our design works well in aSTARice.
1. Risk assessment and marker free system are the efforts we made to deal with the safety issue.
2. We successfully improve the performance of the previously existing BioBrick BBa_K118003
3. Our BioBrick devices work well under the lab condition.
4. Our BioBrick devices work well under the greenhouse condition.
1. BBa_K1959002 works well and has been documented in the Registry entry.
2. We help the students of Guangdong Experimental High School to set up the team named GDSYZX-United and assist them to finish the iGEM project.
3. We educate the public, especially the students and try to enhance the general understanding of GMO in the human practices.
1. Team SCAU-China has registered with great enthusiasm.
2. The Wiki and judging form has been full of our works.
3. Our project and poster will follow us to the Giant Jamboree.
4. We have completed and submitted 3 BioBricks: BBa_K1959000, BBa_K1959001, BBa_K1959003.
