Team:Grenoble-Alpes/Awards

NeuroDrop

Awards

Nominations

NeuroDrop has been nominated in the following award competitions:

  • Best Diagnostic Project
  • Best Composite Part
  • Best Software

Education & Public Engagement

By highlighting the contribution of interdisciplinarity in research time, iGEM Grenoble went through a methodical and rigorous study of social sciences. More than testing and demonstrating its concrete benefits, we aimed to provide tools and guidance for implementing interdisciplinarity within research teams on three level:

  • At our team level: as our team is composed of 13 determined students with different backgrounds, we chose our own team as the first test subject. Biologists, engineers and political scientists were asked to fill separately SWOT before realizing a common one: the purpose was to demonstrate how our different background and experiences enriched our project despite difficulties.
  • At the iGEM level: we collaborate with the Center for Research and Interdisciplinarity on a study on iGEM teams interactions. We had the chance to participate in the elaboration of the questionnaire and add some questions related to interdisciplinarity within iGEM teams. The result allowed us to assess the level of interdisciplinarity among iGEM teams, how it impacts team’s organisation and the learning experience of the students. Thus, the final report could be used as a tool for next teams, guide them on their project management and build more responsible research projects. Potentially renewable next year, this collaborative study enriched the overall iGEM community.
  • At the University level: our campus lack of opportunities where students with different educations could debate and confront their opinions on innovative project. To fill this gap, we chose to create an online community dedicated to biotechnology’s innovation and development. Students in biology, engineering and political sciences showed great interests and discussed for over a week on our platform. By answering the question we prepared, they created a debate on scientifical, technical, legal, environmental and ethical aspects of the development of biotechnology. Through this platform, we promoted interactions between students and the development of interdisciplinarity research projects on our campus. We contacted Disrupt Campus and Promising, two organizations encouraging student initiatives, and told them about our project. Both of them showed great interest and proposed the organisation of a special day-event dedicated to interdisciplinarity on the campus. They are interested in taking over the online community and anime with new debate, making it a long lasting initiative.

To enhance our work on synthetic biology and interdisciplinarity, we partnered up with Maurice Mikkers. This Dutch artist mixed up his biologist knowledge with his artistic sensitivity to take picture of crystallized tears. His photos were the perfect support that NeuroDrop could find to popularize synthetic biology, raise awareness around tears and illustrate in a concrete and poetic way interdisciplinarity.

To introduce potentialities allowed by synthetic biology to the greatest number of people, we first wrote a booklet for elementary school's teachers. It offers the possibility to realize little experimentation with children to observe and understand the utility of bacteria in our daily life. We also got involved in various events, held stands and conferences on synthetic biology for a diverse audience in Grenoble all over the year.

When synthetic biology suffers from misunderstandings among the population, we strived for creating conditions of its acceptation and development toward the common of good.

When iGEM promotes responsible research and innovation, we experienced and provided concrete solutions for such a research to flourish.

When some worked on the research as it is today, we worked on the research of tomorrow.

For all these reasons, iGEM Grenoble pretends to the Education and Public Education Award.

Hardware

In this project, we developed a device that can execute complex protocols and thus be a pragmatic solution for laboratory analysis.

This device can pipette up to six different solutions. Those solutions are manipulated without any risk of contamination. There are then placed on an EWOD plate, which is a technology that allows the drops displacement without loss and with extreme precision. On the EWOD plate, there are two distinct temperature zones that can be controlled. So, we can have multiple experiments running at once on the same plate, or to enable temperature cycles. The prototype we created can also measure the luminescence of the drop. We are capable of detecting any solution using this kind of physical signal as the end result of the detection. This measurement is done using a Silicon Photomultiplier, which is a very sensitive light sensor. The precision of our detection system is very high, higher than what is really needed for our project. It is an advantage because it means that we can reuse the machine for other experiments that might need higher precision in luminescence detection.

The Neurodrop device can also be easily adapted to perform fluorescence measurements (it only requires adding a light source next to the sensor and a filter between the sensor and the solution). In our project, this was not a requirement, but it was rather an asset in giving the device more flexibility.

The device is driven/controlled via a software. It is both simple to use and time-effective (we can create 10h-long protocols in a few minutes). It is a real time-saver for the user. The only work he has to do is defining the protocol to be applied, and simply launching the application.

The overall structure is relatively cheap to build and easy to reproduce, as all the codes, the plans and the 3D representations of the system are available freely.

To know more about our device, please go check our Hardware page.

Software

We created a hardware that can execute protocols that are either very long or very repetitive. The device in itself was complex and difficult to use. Consequently, we added a software to simplify the process.

The goal of the software is to allow the user to control the machine by defining the essential settings for the experiment. This means that to control the machine, there is no prerequisite. The interface is self-explanatory, in fact in only a few minutes the user can master the whole software.

We wanted to create an user-friendly interface interface, where the user can implement any protocol. As we usually define protocols much faster than we apply them, this leads to an undeniable gain in productivity.

The protocols created through the software can be saved and used multiple times. They are also editable without having to define them from scratch. This feature enables preserving the protocol in case of bugs and mistakes, correcting the mistakes and even optimizing the protocols by changing only a few parameters.

The combination of the hardware and the software represents a very powerful alternative of doing the lab work.

To know more about our software, please check our Software page.