Team:Edinburgh OG/Attributions

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Attributions

In addition to our team members, we would like to thank everyone who has provided help, support and advice throughout our project.

Our project Remedye started to take shape after long brainstorm sessions and feedback from supervisors. We were interested in providing a solution in the environmental track and we agreed that in order to develop an integral project with a set of diverse synthetic biology components, each member of the team should have an individual sub-project, which eventually would merge with in one final solution. Remedye aims to solve the problem of dye water pollution derived from the textile industry. We set the goal of creating a circular economy system, where the dye industry wastewater (output) is transformed into valuable products and clean water. In order to produce a valuable product, we found in the literature the ability of an engineered E. coli strain of utilizing aniline – the main and simplest aromatic amine intermediate of azo dyes as carbon, nitrogen and energy source. Therefore, we hypothesized the breakdown of azo dyes into aromatic amines using azo reductases, for feeding a bacterial culture that produces synthetic silk proteins in return. To ensure clean water and health & safety, the remaining effluents are intended to be treated with an improved laccase immobilized on biochar.

Supervisors

	Dr. Heather Barker	Dr. Elise Cachat	Holly Robertson-Dick

The development of our project has been possible with the support of our supervisors, academic advisors, and the feedback provided from industry stakeholders. Dr. Elise Cachat and Dr. Heather Barker were the main advisors, helping us at all stages of the project from the technical planning to the wet-lab execution. Michael McDonald was also extremely supportive in the wet lab work. Holly Robertson-Dick was a key advisor for approaching industry stakeholders and implementing integrated human practices.

Academic Advisors

	Prof. Chris French		Dr. Stephen Wallace

Additionally, we received valuable support for the use of facilities, specialized equipment, reagents, plasmids and strains from a number of people. The French Lab, including, Andreas Andreou, Dr. Eric Thorand, Marcos Ortega, Felipe Millacura and Mengxi Li provided expertise and feedback on the project and presentation. The McCormick Lab (Alejandra Schiavon-Osorio), Wallace Lab, and Horsfall Lab (Zak Rowle) from the University of Edinburgh allowed us to use some of their equipment and gave us their expert insight along the way. Rob Smith of the University of Edinburgh Department of Science, Technology and Innovation studies provided invaluable guidance on how best to consider the public interface of our project. Furthermore, the Joshi Lab from Harvard University kindly provided us with key E. coli strains for working on one of the enzymatic immobilization sub-project. Daniel de la Torre from the MRC Cambridge was the team leader of the UCL 2014 iGEM team Goodbye Azo Dye. We had the chance to speak with him in a visit to Cambridge, and he provided us with fundamental insight to anticipate potential pitfalls. The work carried out by Goodbye Azo Dye is one of the inspirations and basis of our project.

Industrial Advisors

	Lynn Wilson	Carbogenics	Ian Archer

On the industry side, Lynn Wilson from the Circular Economy Wardrobe provided us with relevant insight about the fashion industry and how to create solutions that could bring additional value to established textile manufacturers. Her contribution led us to explore strategies to create circular economy loops, as is the case of the synthetic silk production derived from the same industry dye waste. Ian Archer, technical director from IBioIC helped us to conceptualize how to integrate our bioremediation and synthetic silk research into a wastewater treatment plant as a component of the next generation of textile industry facilities. As an alternative for having an enzymatic formulation free of living organisms and with a longer bioactivity lifespan, Carbogenics (biotech start-up using biochar) helped us to identify the use of biochar as immobilization system for the dye-degrading enzymes that we were working on. The UK Biochar Research Centre kindly provided us with biochar samples to test the functionality.

Team Member Contributions

Each team member contributed to a different part of the experimental work. Nathan, Cathal and Dylan focused on improvement of laccase enzymes; Wendy and Tina focused on investigating methods to immobilise functional enzymes to cells; Mirren, Jakub and Nico investigated, designed and tested different types of biosensor, and Ivan focused on the production of spider silk. Cathal was instrumental in collecting the characterisation data. Cathal, Nathan, Wendy and Ivan were particularly involved in the Human Practices portion of the project, speaking with advisors and collaborators. Mirren, Cathal and Nico collaborated on the wiki design and artwork, with input from the team members. Mirren wrote most of the CSS and HTML code, with the exception of the menu bar code, which was adapted from the 'Linear' template by templated.co (CC-BY). Cathal and his brother Caolán also provided assistance. Nico also designed the poster and banner.

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