WELCOME TO CAU_China!

We are the team of China Agricultural University, CAU-China. For iGEM 2015, there are more than 20 members in our family and they spread from freshmen to juniors in CAU. It is the interest of synthetic biology and the ambition to propagate it that gathers us together. Though it is the third time for our team to take part in this amazing international competition, for most of us, it is the first chance to directly join in the big event. This year, we talked about our project together and came up with an idea about crops. Every year numbers of herbicide is used in agricultural industry. However, the weeds have somehow developed to be resistant to the herbicide because of the more and more extensive use of the herbicide. Therefore, people have to raise the amount of herbicide used in agricultural industry, but the increased amount of herbicide have caused a lot of harmful effect such as toxic substance remaining, crop growth being inhibited and so on. In order to solve the problem, the mix of use of herbicide has been figured out. The mix use of the herbicide has plenty of benefits including decreasing the dose, increasing the efficacy, decreasing the poison residual and expanding the weed control spectrum. In order to adapting the novel use of herbicide, our team created four new genes, all of which have the resistance to two different herbicide. What's more, we also found out that the polypetide 2A had many other interesting application So far we have accomplished a series of tasks, such as Human Practice, Journal Club every week, e-book edition, team construction and so on. As members of our team, we get great pleasure from the process, especially from the activity of brainstorm.
To be a better team, there is still a long way to go, but luckily, we are all adamant about and enthusiastic at that.

Project descriptions

We move the frozen power from Disney to E.coli. We construct E.coli to express RFP to draw a dynamic pattern of snowflake. Once we kindle a spot, the pattern starts and grows up gradually. According to our design, two kinds of E.coli with partly different genetic pathway align alternatively. The two kinds of E.coli interact through two independent quorum sensing systems, LuxI/LuxR/AHL in vibrio fischeri and RpaI/RpaR/pC-HSL in Rhodopseudomonas palustris, while neither of them influencing themselves. A plate for E.coli culture is divided into rectangular grids and every “cell” in the grid is occupied with a colon of E.coli. On-state shows as red fluorescence while off-state shows as nothing illuminating. To kindle the system, we only need to add correspondent signal molecular to the central 4 colons of E.coli in a plate. Finally, there will be a snowflake with red fluorescence starts to grow up from a point automatically.1