Bulletin No. 2, 2015

CUHK Wins Top Prizes at Challenge Cup A team of three students from the School of Life Sciences won the Top Prize and first-class award in life science in July at the 2015 Challenge Cup, Hong Kong Univer sit y Students Extra-curriculum Technology Contest with t he ir winning p ro j e c t ‘Solution for One-step Sewage Treatment’. They were among the 14 teams of CUHK contestants who received the highest share of awards in the contest participated by all local tertiary institutions. Later in November, the CUHK teams received the second top prize, Winners’ Cup, in the 14th Challenge Cup held at Guangdong. Among more than 300 universities from mainland China, Hong Kong and Macau, CUHK became the first and only institution in Hong Kong to receive this highest award. CUHK Genetic Engineering Team Wins Gold Again in iGEM CUHK students won the fourth gold medal at the International Genetic Engineered Machine (iGEM) 2015 Giant Jamboree. This year, the winning project of the CUHK team comprising 13 undergraduate students of science and engineering was named ‘Magnetosome Forming Azotobacter vinelandii ’. The students devised a synthetic biology system to generate magnetosome, a kind of biological magnetic particles with hundred times surface-to-volume ratio than the current nanoparticles, inside a soil bacterium called Azotobacter vinelandii under an intracellular anaerobic condition. This system can absorb metals in contaminated waters and soils, thus making it useful to tackle marine pollution and lead-contaminated water problems. Potentially, it can also be used to extract any protein or enzyme, and therefore may find its applications in food and pharmaceutical industries. 30 Chinese University Bulletin No. 2, 2015 The Best and the Brightest