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.
A Keelung high school on Saturday night apologized for using a picture containing a Chinese flag on the cover of the senior yearbook, adding that it has recalled the books and pledged to provide students new ones before graduation on Thursday. Of 309 Affiliated Keelung Maritime Senior High School of National Taiwan Ocean University graduates, 248 had purchased the yearbook. Some students said that the printer committed an outrageous error in including the picture, while others said that nobody would notice such a small flag on the cover. Other students said that they cared more about the photographs of classmates and what was
GOING INTERNATIONAL: Rakuten Girls squad leader Ula Shen said she was surprised that baseball fans outside of Taiwan not only knew of them, but also knew their names Major League Baseball’s (MLB) Oakland Athletics on Saturday hosted its first Taiwanese Heritage Day event at the Oakland Coliseum with a performance by Taiwanese cheerleading squad the Rakuten Girls and a video message from Vice President William Lai (賴清德). The Rakuten Girls, who are the cheerleaders for the CPBL’s Rakuten Monkeys, performed in front of a crowd of more than 2,000 people, followed by a prerecorded address by Lai about Taiwan’s baseball culture and democratic spirit. Taiwanese pitcher Sha Tzu-chen (沙子宸), who was signed by the Athletics earlier this year, was also present. Mizuki Lin (林襄), considered a “baseball cheerleading goddess” by Taiwanese
A 14-legged giant isopod is the highlight of a new dish at a ramen restaurant in Taipei and it has people lining up — both for pictures and for a bite from this bowl of noodles. Since “The Ramen Boy” launched the limited-edition noodle bowl on Monday last week, declaring in a social media post that it had “finally got this dream ingredient,” more than 100 people have joined a waiting list to dine at the restaurant. “It is so attractive because of its appearance — it looks very cute,” said the 37-year-old owner of the restaurant, who wanted to be
EVA Airways was ranked the eighth-best airline in the world for this year, the only Taiwanese carrier to make it into the top 25 Airline Excellence Awards this year, aviation reviews Web site AirlineRatings.com said on Wednesday. AirlineRatings.com has a seven-star rating system to evaluate more than 360 airlines around the world every year, EVA Airways said in a statement on Thursday. “We are delighted that efforts by the entire EVA staff have been recognized by Airline Ratings,” EVA Airways president Clay Sun (孫嘉明) said in the release. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the company identified and adopted services and procedures that enhance and