On November 14, iGEM2021 (International Genetically Engineered Machine competition), the international top event in the field of synthetic biology in 2021, came to an end. iGEM, an international competition integrating Life Sciences, Mathematics, Engineering, Information Science, and Art Design, etc. with synthetic biology as the core, was first initiated by Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 2003, which has attracted extensive attention and special reports from academic journals such as Nature, Science, Scientific American and Economists, as well as media such as BBC.

Affected by the COVID-19, the planned on-site iGEM2021 in Paris was changed to online competition. 343 top teams from MIT, University of Manchester, Technical University of Berlin, University of Paris, Tsinghua University, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Zhejiang University and other well-known universities at home and abroad participated in the competition. “BIT-China”, the team of the School of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, BIT, stood out with the project “Creative Tasting Officer and Its Exclusive Seasonings” and won the iGEM2021 Gold Award, demonstrating the strength and style of BITers, and winning honors for BIT on this stage of top international event.

BIT-China is a well-experienced iGEM team, which was established in 2012 and participated in the competition for the first time in 2013. It has won 7 gold awards and 2 silver awards in nine years, and was nominated for the Best New Application Individual Award in 2015. BIT-China focuses on the research direction of Biochemical Intelligent Biofactory, concentrating on the synthesis of fine chemicals, intelligent biomanufacturing, and fermentation industrial production.

Since the beginning of this year, iGEM2021_BIT-China has completed many tasks, such as social research, independent topic selection, scientific experiments, mathematical modeling, social practice, popular science education, art design, website development and so on. Finally, through Jamboree’s Video display and defense, it won the high recognition of the judges and experts.

Project Introduction:

Taste is the soul of food. Major food companies around the world are looking for ways to quantify the basic taste of food in order to develop more distinctive products to meet people’s requirements for food flavor. At present, sensory evaluation method and electronic tongue evaluation method are mainly used to quantify the taste. The former is costly and greatly affected by subjectivity, and can not measure the taste of a variety of foods. Therefore, BIT-China is committed to designing a biosensor——“Creative Tasting Officer” to quantify the basic taste, which adopts saccharomyces cerevisiae to express human receptors heterologously, and takes intensity of fluorescence to show the strength of the basic taste of food. In addition, BIT-China has also developed a series of soy-based customized seasonings and a flavor card website, which could provide the service to help find favorite flavors through personalized colors by clicking on the dishes.