Haide College iGEM Team Wins International Gold Again!

From October 23rd to 26th, 2024, the International Genetically Engineering Machine Competition (iGEM) was held in Paris, France, and Haide College’s team, OUC-Haide, once again earned a prestigious gold medal at this global event.

The iGEM competition, initiated by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), is a premier international synthetic biology competition for university students. It is a multidisciplinary contest that brings together fields such as mathematics, computer science, and statistics. This year’s competition attracted over 400 teams from 50 countries, with more than 4,000 participants, including teams from top universities at home and abroad such as Stanford University, MIT, University of Oxford, Tsinghua University and Peking University.

The OUC-Haide team’s project, “BEST-ABfree”, focuses on utilizing β-glucan as an “antimicrobial vaccine” to stimulate the immune system of animals and replace antibiotics for bacterial eradication, aimed at addressing the critical issue of antibiotic abuse in agricultural production. At the same time, By leveraging transgenic technology, the team successfully modified the marine yeast strain BZ-11 to overcome challenges in β-glucan production. In addition, OUC-Haide team members independently designed a fully automatic aquaculture feed delivery system, dedicated to achieving precise feeding for aquatic animals. In order to integrate the project with real-world applications, team members conducted extensive human practice activities, visiting farmers, aquaculture sites, and factories for direct engagement and feedback. To encourage more people to participate in synthetic biology education, the team analyzed a decade of iGEM education data and proposed solutions to each identified problem, actively promoting the popularization and development of synthetic biology.

OUC Haide has participated in the iGEM  for two consecutive years. This year, the team continued the excellence established by their predecessors, completing all aspects of the project—topic selection, experimental design, scheme implementation, and results summary—entirely independently. Notably, OUC-Haide was the only gold-medal-winning team among universities in Shandong Province, exemplifying the spirit of Haide students who are brave in exploration, active in innovation, and rigorous in collaboration, and further demonstrating the effectiveness of Haide College’s commitment to cultivating globally minded, innovative talent. Since initiating iGEM preparations in 2022, Haide College has secured gold medals in the competition for two consecutive years. The college will continue to actively encourage students to participate in high-level academic competitions domestically and internationally, focusing on training and improving their teamwork and scientific research innovation literacy.