"It's exciting (for the team) to be awarded with a gold medal and, more surprisingly, a nominated gold medal for the Best New Basic Part," Prof. WANG Shi'an said, when talking about the excellent performance of the Ocean University of China (OUC) team in the International Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM 2017) competition ended at Boston two months ago. Prof. WANG happily recalled the experience with the OUC team, on project design, experimental details, literature comprehension and lab visits, through seminars at the Qingdao Institute of Bioenergy and Bioprocess Technology (QIBEBT), Chinese Academy of Sciences.

One and a half years ago, as a young microbiologist at QIBEBT, a neighboring national research institute of OUC, Prof. WANG was selected to become a co-instructor for a team of OUC undergraduates without concretely trained R&D experience in synthetic biology. "It's a tough task, but they are really diligent, innovative and enthusiastic," Prof. WANG said.

The OUC project titled "A bottle of algae 'wine'-Producing ethanol from algae" was finally confirmed after the careful investigation and survey by the team, aiming to solve the local algae outbreak problems by efficient conversion of algae cellulose into ethanol, which was supposed to be a great idea to produce new energy from waste algae by yeast synthetic biology. QIBEBT is well-known worldwide for fruitful outputs in algae and microbial study. Prof. WANG Shi'an is exactly working in yeast biotechnology in the Microbial Resources Group of QIBEBT.

"Our Principal Investigator (PI) LIU Chenguang, SUI Zhenghong, and WANG Shi'an offered us constructive advice over our project and gave us long term technical consulting support through the whole procedure," the team showed sincere acknowledgements to these sophisticated instructors on the iGEM website.