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Throughout the whole season, we maintained close contact and engaged in fruitful collaboration with the iGEM BUCT team from Beijing University of Chemical Technology. On May 6, during our initial online meeting, both teams shared updates on their project designs, Human Practices, and other developments, offering each other valuable insights.

Additionally, we are pleased to have joined the Biosyn Bridge Education Program, initiated by the BUCT team, as partners. This is a non-profit educational project in synthetic biology that emphasizes global reach, equality, and open access. Here, we created a popular science video on CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing technology, assisting in the promotion of the Biosyn Bridge Education Program in Southeast Asia and further expanding its global impact. For more details, please refer to our Education and Communication page.

Synbio Callenges is a synthetic biology event organised by the Synthetic Biology Branch of the Chinese Society for Biological Engineering (CSBE), with the participation of many iGEM teams. Synbio Callenges provides a good platform for synthetic biology research teams in China to communicate with each other, and during the event there are activities such as competition judging, academic wall presentations, roundtable discussions, and so on.

From 7-10 August 2024, our team went to Shenzhen, China to participate in the event. During the conference, we listened to the presentation on ‘Synthetic Biology Build to Use’ by Prof. Zhang Xian'en, Vice President of CSBE, and were greatly encouraged by the fact that synthetic biology can be widely applied in biochemicals, biomedicine, enabling technologies, and food of the future, among other areas.

In addition, we exchanged project designs with many teams during the academic poster session. For example, the iGEM BIT-China 2024 team's project of recovering heavy metal ions from used batteries by displaying metal-binding peptides on cell surfaces was similar to ours, and we had an in-depth exchange. For yeast surface display, the metal-binding short peptide used by the BIT-China 2024 team may be easier to surface display than our TFD large protein; for the biosorption module, they plan to use polyester nonwovens for strain immobilisation, while we drive yeast surface adhesion by overexpressing the FLO11 gene.

On July 27, 2024, the Academic Exchange Activity of "Towards Synthetic Biology-2024 iGEM Project" sponsored by BioPlus Institute of Science and Technology was held at Zhejiang University. Representatives of 9 iGEM teams from the surrounding regions participated. The activity was co-chaired by Dr. Shan Dong, President of BioPlus Research Institute, and Dr. Jing Shi , Biological Project Director of BioPlus. Ms. Nan Zhang, Vice Chairman of the iGEM Organizing Committee, delivered the opening speech on behalf of the iGEM Organizing Committee. Ms. Nan Zhang, Dr. Zhou Tan, Associate Professor of Hangzhou Normal University, and Dr. Shuang Liu, iGEM team Advisor of Zhejiang University of Technology, made inspiring comments on the projects of the participating teams.

Several teachers warned us to carefully evaluate the effectiveness of the project in industrial applications and suggested that we further consider the optimization of the project's sustainability. Besides, the work of Human Practice is not rich enough, which can be enriched by projects such as the investigation of market demand and consumer attitude.The most important thing is our project consists of five modules, which makes it feel that the focus is not strong enough. The goals of different modules may be contradictory, so subtraction should be appropriately carried out in the implementation process, so that the core of the five modules can be better condensed. For example, Thiobacillus Ferrooxidans is often chosen over yeast when leaching minerals. Because the membrane protein produced by yeast has a high degree of glycosylation,which interferes with its binding to metal ions. However, glycosylation is also conducive to biological adhesion, which indicates that the goals of different modules may conflict.

We would then need to evaluate how well the project can be applied to real industrial processes, and further evaluate the sustainability of the project by adding HP content such as market research and other comprehensive metrics.Meanwhile,we would consider more about the internal relationships among the five experimental modules in the subsequent experimental design. On the basis of protein transformation as the core module, we would continue to improve the experimental scheme to maximize the effectiveness of each module. For example, the binding efficiency might be reduced due to protein glycosylation, which can be compensated by increasing the amount of protein displayed on the surface.