Wuhan University has won a gold prize at the annual International Genetically Engineered Machine Competition (iGEM) Asia division. It was also the second consecutive year for the WHU team to win a Best Mascot Prize.
The 2013 iGEM Asia Division, hosted by the Chinese University of Hong Kong, brought together 65 teams from counties such as Australia, Japan, South Korea, India and Nepal. to compete. 19 of the teams (including WHU) were selected to compete further in the world championship in Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), USA through website, poster and slide show presentations.
The WHU team entered the project “a New Method for Gene Expression Regulation: Gene Expression Multi-level Regulation Based on Tandem Promoter and dCas9 Protein” under the leadership of Professor Chen Yufu from WHU’s School of Life Sciences. Currently, the team is undertaking a new round of experiments to prepare for championship in the U.S. in November.
WHU is among the first school’s to have an iGEM team in China and has entered world championship three times with a bronze award in 2011 and a silver award in 2012.
The iGEM competition is evolved from a summer course at MIT where students designed systems to make cells blink. The aim of iGEM is to encourage students to transform engineer bacteria and endow it with unique features while exploring artificial life.
