Group photo of the winning team

In the International Genetically Engineered Machine Competition (iGEM), which ended on October 28, theSZPT-CHINA team, guided by Kui Jingjing and Liu Hongbo, teachers of fine chemical technology from the School of Materials and Environmental Engineering with the assistance of Li Li, a teacher from the School of Foreign Languages and Business, following the team gold award and two best individual awards for the “Self-Growing Artificial Skin to Treat Burns” project last year, continued to win the gold award this year for the “Self-growing Multi-functional Cellulose Membrane for Beauty and Skin Care” project, and was nominated in the Best Education category, ranking at the forefront of the competition with 356 teams from many renowned colleges at home and abroad, fully demonstrating the vocational education spirit of our students who are brave to struggle, keep innovating, and use both their hands and brains.

The team consists of 15 members from eight majors in five schools at SZPT. During the 10 months of preparation, the team members went from being unfamiliar to cooperating well with each other to overcome the adverse effects brought by the epidemic and complete the research and project design, experiment and test, modeling, human practice activities, website building, defense and other related aspects.

The “Self-growing Multi-functional Cellulose Membrane for Beauty and Skin Care” project aims to design and verify the relevant multi-functional cellulose membrane in view of the relativelysimple functions of current beauty and skin care products, i.e. few skin care products can simultaneously achieve such effects as whitening, freckle removal, anti-aging, repair and moisturizing. The project uses the method of synthetic biology to construct engineering bacteria based on acetobacter xylinum. The modified acetobacter xylinum can produce cellulose membrane under red light irradiation, which plays the role of moisturizing, and produce glutathione (GSH) and bacterial lysate under blue light irradiation, which can simultaneously play the role of whitening, freckle removal, anti-aging, repair, and maintaining microecological balance. The project offers emulsion and gel products for verification, which have obtained very good results.

The International Genetically Engineered Machine Competition (iGEM), started in 2003 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), is an annual international top academic competition for college students in the field of synthetic biology. iGEM grew into an international competition in 2005, with 113 teams participating in 2009, 343 teams in 2018, 352 teams in 2021 and 356 teams from 45 countries and regions in 2022, including Harvard, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford, Cambridge, Oxford, Nanyang Technological University, Peking University, Tsinghua University, Chinese University of Hong Kong, Southern University of Science and Technology and other world-class colleges anduniversities. Every year, iGEM receives attention and features in Nature and Science.

(Liu Hongbo, Kui Jingjing, School of Materials and Environmental Engineering)