Two teams of undergraduates at SJTU have awarded a Gold Medal and a Silver Medal in the world’s largest synthetic biology competition for designing an online genome database, Riss, and a gene editing visualization model.

The International Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM) competition is an annual, worldwide synthetic biology event mostly aimed at undergraduate university students. The competition gives students the opportunity to push the boundaries of synthetic biology by tackling everyday issues facing the world. Every year nearly 6,000 people dedicate their summer to iGEM since it began in 2003.

 The competition was held online due to the pandemic and it announced the winners of its annual international student competition on Nov. 22nd. The two teams from SJTU School of Life Sciences and Biotechnology, namely SJTU-software and SJTU-BioX-Shanghai, competed with over 250 participating teams from prestigious universities all over the world, such as MIT, Tsinghua University, Peking University, and have earned a Gold Medal and a Silver Medal.

  At the iGEM 2020 Virtual Giant Jamboree, team SJTU-software was honored a Gold Medal with the project, Riss (meaning Rice from SJTU-software), an online synthetic biology website that integrates a database of rice genome, transcriptome, proteome and other related information, as well as its unique algorithms. Relying on the analysis of 3,010 rice genomes by Professor Wei, the project has a huge sample pool to analyze genome-wide key loci function, which will provide references for the development of new rice strains with high yield and high tolerance. Team SJTU-software was led by Prof. Chaochun WEI, Prof. Feng CHEN, Prof. Hongyu OU, Associate Researcher Yue ZHANG, and Teacher Maoying WU from School of Life Science and Biotechnology.

The other team SJTU-BioX-Shanghai has awarded a Silver Medal with the project named Rational Design Assisted Directed Evolution of CRISPR-Cas9 System on Specific Gene, which aims at the bottleneck of the 2020 Nobel Prize winner CRISPR technology, off-target. This project is a further revision model from last year, optimizing its off-target measurement, directed evolution and rational design. The model includes two types of characterization systems, CRISPRa and CRISPRi, to visualize off-target level. To further advocate synthetic biology, team SJTU-BioX-Shanghai also held several online and offline academic seminars, and published multiple academic-related articles on their popular science WeChat account SJTU-BioX-Shanghai. The team was led by Prof. Lin HE (CAS academician), Associate Researcher Gang MA and Teacher Yushu WANG from Bio-X Research Institute.