Guangzhou students win gold at iGEM Competition

A group of ingenious Guangzhou high school students won gold at the 2017 International Genetically Engineered Machine Competition (iGEM Competition 2017) which was held in the US city of Boston on Nov 13.

The iGEM Competition is the premiere student team contest in synthetic biology. For over 10 years, iGEM has been encouraging students to work together to solve real-world challenges by building genetically engineered biological systems with standardized, interchangeable parts. Student teams design, build and test their projects and gather to present their work and compete at the annual jamboree. 

More than 6,000 students from over 300 student teams from across the world participated in the competition with only nine of them winning gold medals including the team from Guangdong Experimental High School. The team stood out with their research achievement of creating a long-acting biological mosquito killer called Pesti-jelly.

A student team from Guangdong Experimental High School wins a gold medal at the iGEM Competition 2017 held in the US city of Boston on Nov 13. [Photo/Chinanews.com]

According to Jin Wanxuan, a member of the team, traditional ways of killing mosquitos include using electronic mosquito swatters and mosquito-repellent, which can be inconvenient to use or may cause damage to the environment. Their method targets mosquito larva and can exterminate mosquitos in an environmentally-friendly way.

The key components of Pesti-jelly are two types of mosquito-killing toxic proteins, which will cooperatively kill mosquito larva. In order to extract the toxic protein genes from germs, the group made enormous efforts during the two-month summer vacation, consulting a great number of scientific documents and using the knowledge they have learnt in synthetic biology, genetic engineering, and statistics.

And the team's efforts have paid off in another way with the mosquito lab of the Southern Medical University deciding to cooperate with their project, helping them to transfer their research achievement to products and tap the mosquito repellant market.