General Support
The Illinois Institute of Technology requires all students to take an Interprofessional Projects class. The idea of the course is to bring together students and faculty of all disciplines to research issues, define problems, and develop real-world solutions. One of our prof thought that it was an amazing idea to have an iPRO class that participated in the iGEM competition as it fulfills all of the IPRO requirements. IPRO classes are only one semester, which is why we have worked in this project for 3 semesters; spring, summer and fall. In these 3 semesters we have a variety of students who have participated in one semester and some students have been participating for 2 semesters.
Our spring semester started in January 14th and this team was focused on deciding what project we will be presenting to iGEM. The spring team did a variety of research on topics of interest to the students and they had 2 main projects at the end of the semester, but one project came to be the final decision, Green Ocean was our main interest and it was decided that this project was going to be presented at iGEM.
Our summer team began on May 20th and this team was mainly working in the lab all summer. This team took care of all the necessary arrangements to conduct an experiment and make Green Ocean a successful project. Our summer team was subdivided into 2 teams, cloning team and assay team. This team also created protocols to test our results and see how successful our project was.
The fall team began on august 19th and this is the team that help finalize everything and get ready for the presentation at the iGEM competition. The fall team which is composed of summer team members, spring team members and some new members have worked together to study our results, worked on uploading all our info into the wiki page led by Dasha Day Hisoler who is an Information Technology management major and the submission of a non-provisional patent led by Elias Kluiszo.
Project support and advice
The beginning of our project commenced in January with our spring team. The research and topic of interest was narrow down by our spring semester. By the end of the spring semester we had our top choice, Green Ocean. Additionally, by the end of the spring semester we had created our vector with the superPETase gene and ordered our necessary materials in order to move on with the lab work. Prof Menhart and Bhushan worked together with team members in the modification of the SuperPETase gene and in the materials ordered to begin lab work in the summer.
The lab worked started in the summer with our summer team. Over the summer our team had extra helps helping in the lab. Vladimir Stojković who is third year Biomedical Engineer helped with protein purification in isolation of the PETase enzyme. We also had Annah Ellingston who is not taking the project for credit in the fall is still participating with lab work. We additionally seek advice from Prof Spink regarding cyanobacteria transformation procedures. Dr. Lisa Smith together with Prof Menhart and Bhushan guided us through the process of creating a pitch for investors regarding our project. Furthermore, with the help of Pro bono lawyers at the IIT Kent Law school, our team was able to file a non- provisional patent for our modified cyanobacteria.
We additionally had support from VectorBuilder in the spring semester. VectorBuilder sponsored us with the vectors that we needed to start our project. We created our SuperPETase gene with the help of a review article (1-2) and we imputed our gene sequence into a vector in VectorBuilder. VectorBuilder then created our vector and shipped it to us to be able to start our project. Without vectorBuilder’s help we would not have started our project in time.
With all the help and advice that we received throughout the project, the people who made this project a reality was all of our team members who have worked extremely hard throughout the semesters to be prepare for iGEM. If you would like to learn more about our team, we encourage you to visit our team page and see how each individual team member contributed in our project.
Fundraising help and advice
We have had much fundraising support from our own institution specifically the Inter-Professional Office and the College of Science. Our institution believes that we have worked hard in our project and gave the opportunity for students to attend the IGEM competition. Vector Builder is an amazing company that was introduced to us by a professor. VectorBuilder is a company that helps you create the vectors that you are looking for in order to develop your project. Vector builder has sponsor us by providing the vectors that we need it in this project. They have also supplied us with shirts to wear to the actual competition in which we included or team logo! Additionally we have received more sponsorship from Centro company. Centro company is a company who provides software services supporting the digital media landscape.They allowed us to collect more funds in order for more team members to attend the IGEM competition.
References
- Ma, Y., Yao, M., Li, B., Ding, M., He, B., Chen, S., Zhou, X., and Yuan, Y. (2018) Enhanced Poly(ethylene terephthalate) Hydrolase Activity by Protein Engineering. Engineering. 4, 888–893
- Spence, E., Sarcina, M., Ray, N., Møller, S. G., Mullineaux, C. W., and Robinson, C. (2003) Membrane-specific targeting of green fluorescent protein by the Tat pathway in the cyanobacterium Synechocystis PCC6803. Molecular Microbiology. 48, 1481–1489
