Form 4 GHAFOOR ASMAH, Mahnoor, Yau Tung Yan

We all were biology students from Form 4 who attended the SynBio Workshop held by the iGEM teams from CUHK and CityU. From there, we learnt many new things related to biology that may be useful for the future. 

Synthetic biology is a rapidly growing field of research that uses engineering principles to design and construct nucleic acid-encoded biological components, devices, systems, machines, and organisms. In addition, synthetic biology is a new way of applying biological science to daily life. At present, synthetic biology has been implemented in many industries, such as agriculture, energy, creativity and medicine, etc. 

In this seminar, we learnt about some advantages and limitations of synthetic biology. e.g. for advantages they would benefit conservation, yield desired products (drugs and biofuels) and can innovate new treatments. The limitations include unpredictability causing environmental damage and have difficult regulations. The seminar was great, it enriched our knowledge and was really interesting. In general I’d say synthetic biology is really important.

On the other hand, the iGem projects from CUHK and CityU are definitely worth mentioning. iGEM Competition stands for International Genetically Engineered Machine Competition which is a worldwide synthetic biology competition. There are many objectives of iGEM, where some of them include exploring the boundaries of synthetic biology, manufacturing a society which can bid for biological technology productively and safely. A lot of things can be learnt by this workshop, but I must say that the presentation was very admirable, especially the university students. They explained the details of synthetic biology precisely for all of us to understand. 

I wish the teams fruitful results from the competition in the coming final presentations and Q&A session!