Register and Attend: We’re all set to travel to Boston and hope to enjoy the Giant Jamboree!
Competition Deliverables:
Team Wiki: Our wiki is complete, with the standard pages under the iGEM logo fulfilling all the requirements posted and submitted before the Oct. 21st deadline
Team Poster: We look forward to presenting our poster at the Giant Jamboree, it was a pleasure designing and crafting the story behind our project through this poster.
Team Presentation: We look forward to presenting on the subject of PAH degradation (through innovations in synthetic biology) while synthesizing biohydrogen as a byproduct.
Judging Form: We’ve completed a judging form that can be found in the header of our website
Project Attributions: Check out our Attributions page under the team tab! We’ve thanked our collaborators, advisors, teachers, and associates for the achievements we’ve had during this year’s competition.
Project Inspiration and Description: Check out our Description page under the Project tab in the header! We’ve provided a brief history of oil spills, the description and issues associated with the oil spill that inspired our team's project (the 2016 San Diego River Oil Spill), and given a concise but detailed summary of our project's aims.
Registry Part Pages: Our team experimentally confirmed that part BBa_K2566006 worked as it degraded chrysene to acetyl-CoA. The part was successfully implemented into E. coli and allowed clones to metabolize chrysene as a carbon source. By doing this, we added quantitative experimental characterization data to an existing Part from the Registry of Standard Biological Parts. Please check out this link for more information on the part.
Silver
Validated Parts: Our team experimentally confirmed that our newly designed part, BBa_K3270002, works. By doing this, we confirmed that at least one new BioBrick Part of our own design that is related to our project works as expected. Our clones were able to successfully produce higher amounts of hydrogen than controls. Please check out this link for more information on the part, as well as check out our Parts Overview page for other information.
Collaboration: We collaborated with 4 different teams, the details of which can be found under our collaboration tab. With each collaboration, we sought to find ways to connect our project ideas, and to find parallels between how we could improve our projects to connect them to the community and to human practices. Overall, we organized a meetup with two other iGEM teams where we mentored each other and troubleshooted parts of each others' projects, and translated synthetic biology curriculum to be used by both our team and two other teams. More information can be found on our Collaborations page (under Team tab).
Human Practices: We made sure our project made a significant impact on the community as a whole, with activities ranging from hosting a week-long iGEM Summer Camp to beach cleanups. We introduced the idea of synthetic biology and biotechnology to various middle and elementary school students, and collected over 20 pounds of trash at a beach cleanup. We used our project as a catalyst for increasing awareness of the nuances of biological research, and we made sure we talked to experts in the field to ensure our project was viable and potentially implementable, including scientists with direct experience of working on the Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill. We also interviewed people living and frequently visiting the ocean and the beach (our target communities) to learn more about public perceptions of our projects, and hopefully be able to address some of these concerns and improve the design and/or implementation of our project. More information can be found on the Education and Engagement page.
Gold
Integrated Human Practices: Taking the advice of the scientists we talked to, we used their techniques and guidance to improve our testing procedures. Specifically, we talked to 5 scientists at GoMRI (Gulf of Mexico Research Initiative), and integrated their advice into our project. First, as a suggestion from one of the scientists, we designed a bioreactor to stimulate a controlled environment for E. Coli to degrade PAHs and synthesize biohydrogen. This also helped improve the design of our project, and helped clear one of the concerns the public raised: the potential side-effects of our project. Another integration was the use of modeling to investigate the effectiveness and accuracy of our degradation pathways, thus allowing us to improve both the design and implementation of our project. More details can be found under the Human Practices page.
Improving the function of a BioBrick: We did not participate to be evaluated for this criteria.
Modeling: We did an intensive modeling of the degradation pathways and mechanisms behind our project’s degradation of fluorene, naphthalene, phenanthrene, and chrysene using MATLAB and its Simbiology Extension. We modeled our degradation pathways and simulated these to produce graphs of resulting product quantities. The models can be found under our Modeling page.
Demonstration: We did not participate to be evaluated for this criteria.
