We belong to the Department of Biotechnology at Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology (TUAT) in Japan. Our team comprises ten undergraduate students, four instructors and an advisor. This is the first time for us to take participate in iGEM. Prof. Sode informed us about iGEM competition, and we girded up our loins to build 'Tokyo-NokoGen'. All the members have a great deal of interest in synthetic biology although we don't major in synthetic biology.Trying to achieve the goal of our project, we would like to realize how wonderful synthetic biology is. It is attractive for us because synthetic biology is capable of unrestricted design and construction of a novel biological system by bottom-up approach starting from almost nothing, different from "genetic engineering" that is our major. We think it is essential to unify biotechnology with other research fields such as system engineering, mathematics and bioinformatics because the biological system is so complicated. This correlation of different fields of study is what we aim to do in our department of Biotechnology in TUAT.We are glad to have a precious experience to learn how to develop our project. In this year, we will corporate with NYMU-Taipei at National Yang Ming University in Taiwan. We have already had a first live meeting and gotten to know each other. From now on, we would like to compete with each other and construct attractive genetically engineered machine.With renewed dreams and hope, we have started our projects !
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