A team students from National Yang Ming University (NYMU) students have won a gold medal at the International Genetic Engineering Machine 2007 (iGEM 2007) competition.
Their project could help diabetics improve their quality of life and was titled "GlucOperon: An auto-regulated system with both feed-forward and feed-back controls."
The team was made up of seven undergraduate students from the Department of Life Sciences, Department of Medicine and Department of Dentistry, plus five graduate students from the Institute of Bioinformatics and Institute of Biotechnology in Medicine, university sources said.
The iGEM award is an initiative of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) iCampus program. The objective of the annual competition is to provide a platform for teams of students worldwide to design and build engineered biological systems using advanced genetic components and technologies.
Since its launch, the iGEM award has become a popular annual competition among university students around the world. This year, the contest drew 59 teams and 580 students from 18 different countries.
The NYMU team, the sole representatives from Taiwan, said its GlucOperon project was the result of team brainstorming.
The team used Escherichia coli (E. coli) as a model to assess the feasibility of the whole insulin secretion system. If the system can successfully be applied to human bodies, it could help diabetic patients avoid stroke caused by insulin overdose.
The project focuses on the development of a prokaryotic system to reduce the reliance of patients on synthetic insulin. The concept was widely praised by participating teams for its innovation and feasibility, the sources said.
In addition to the NYMU team, teams from US-based Harvard University, Princeton University and University of California, Berkeley, also won gold medals in the competition, the sources said.
Considering that most countries issue more than five denominations of banknotes, the central bank has decided to redesign all five denominations, the bank said as it prepares for the first major overhaul of the banknotes in more than 24 years. Central bank Governor Yang Chin-lung (楊金龍) is expected to report to the Legislative Yuan today on the bank’s operations and the redesign’s progress. The bank in a report sent to the legislature ahead of today’s meeting said it had commissioned a survey on the public’s preferences. Survey results showed that NT$100 and NT$1,000 banknotes are the most commonly used, while NT$200 and NT$2,000
The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) yesterday reported the first case of a new COVID-19 subvariant — BA.3.2 — in a 10-year-old Singaporean girl who had a fever upon arrival in Taiwan and tested positive for the disease. The girl left Taiwan on March 20 and the case did not have a direct impact on the local community, it said. The WHO added the BA.3.2 strain to its list of Variants Under Monitoring in December last year, but this was the first imported case of the COVID-19 variant in Taiwan, CDC Deputy Director-General Lin Ming-cheng (林明誠) said. The girl arrived in Taiwan on
South Korea is planning to revise its controversial electronic arrival card, a step Taiwanese officials said prompted them to hold off on planned retaliatory measures, a South Korean media report said yesterday. A Yonhap News Agency report said that the South Korean Ministry of Foreign Affairs is planning to remove the “previous departure place” and “next destination” fields from its e-arrival card system. The plan, reached after interagency consultations, is under review and aims to simplify entry procedures and align the electronic form with the paper version, a South Korean ministry official said. The fields — which appeared only on the electronic form
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) is suspending retaliation measures against South Korea that were set to take effect tomorrow, after Seoul said it is updating its e-arrival system, MOFA said today. The measures were to be a new round of retaliation after Taiwan on March 1 changed South Korea's designation on government-issued alien resident certificates held by South Korean nationals to "South Korea” from the "Republic of Korea," the country’s official name. The move came after months of protests to Seoul over its listing of Taiwan as "China (Taiwan)" in dropdown menus on its new online immigration entry system. MOFA last week
RSS