B R O N Z E
1. Registration and Giant Jamboree Attendance
This year, we will send 10 of our members along with 2 of our PIs to the Giant Jamboree to meet all the teams from around the world and share our project and learn from the other teams’ project!
2. Competition Deliverables
During the Giant Jamboree, we will be in the Zone 2 - 193 where you will be able to meet us and see our poster.
We will also be presenting our work on Friday 1st, November at 5:30 PM in the Room Ballroom A.
Finally, in order to make our content accessible to the public wherever they are, our wiki has a responsive web design on laptops, tablets and smartphones !
To find out more about our medal criteria and their completion, visit our Judging Form.
3. Attributions
Throughout our journey, each and every one of us devoted ourselves to build our project.
To find out more about what each members did in our project, visit our Attributions page.
4. Project Inspiration and Description
The palm oil production and its impacts are an iconic challenge for today’s society in terms of environmental, economic and social sustainability. We challenged ourselves to come up with an alternative way of producing oil using synthetic biology and a microalga to find an innovative solution to this problematic.
Our goal is to develop an alternative method of producing oils in Chlamydomonas reinhardtii and to prove our concept we are engineering strains of C. reinhardtii to produce the main components of palm oil by expressing key african oil palm enzymes to tweak the lipid metabolism and increase the production of our lipids of interest.
To find out more about what our project is and how we came to it, visit our Description page.
5. Contribution
The iGEM Registry of Standard Biological Parts is an essential part of the iGEM competition. This collection is mainly built by us students participating in the iGEM competition. We wanted to contribute to the registry by adding quantitative data to existing parts of the Registry to further improve our knowledge on these parts.
To find out more about our characterization of a part from the Registry, visit our Contribution page.
S I L V E R
1. Validated Part
During our project we have created 4 basic parts, two HiBiT tags in N-terminal (BBa_K2909000) and C-terminal (BBa_K2909001), respectively for the C. reinhardtii MoClo kit and two African oil palm enzymes, LPAAT-A (BBa_K2909002) and DGAT-1-2 (BBa_K2909003) which have codon optimized for C. reinhardtii and standardized for the C. reinhardtii MoClo.
To find out more about our basic parts and their characterization, visit our Basic Part page and their respective Registry pages.
2. Collaboration
One of iGEM’s goals is to promote its community through knowledge sharing and collaborations. We have worked together with other teams from around the world on many different small projects such as policies, art or our microalga chassis.
To find out more about what collaborations we did and with which teams, visit our Collaborations page.
3. Human Practices
How does our project affect the world and how does the world affect it ? Is our work good enough for the world ? What are the environmental, ethical and societal issues linked to palm oil and what is synthetic biology ? To answer these questions we have carefully and creatively investigated different approaches during our project.
To find out more about our approaches, visit our Integrated Human Practices and Education & Public Engagement pages.
G O L D
1. Integrated Human Practices
During our project, we were able to meet and interview many fantastic people who helped us tremendously in shaping our project to what it is today. Their knowledge and advices helped us gain insights in the different aspects of our project and were critical to solve some of our project’s challenges.
To find out more on how these people helped us shape our project, visit our Human Practices page.
2. Model Your Project
During our project, we modeled our system to better understand how our strategy would affect the lipid metabolism of our chassis. We used Flux Balance Analysis to predict the effect of expressing our African oil palm enzymes in C. reinhardtii. Building a working model for our project will help us in designing further iterations of our project and the Wet Lab results will in turn help us further improve the model.
To find out more about our model, visit our Model page.
3. Demonstration of Your Work
We were able to fully implement the HiBiT technology in the C. reinhardtii MoClo Kit and in our strains to create an easy and quick way of assessing the expression of our enzymes without hindering their activities too much as they are very tiny tags.
We were also able to express the African oil palm enzymes in C. reinhardtii and we were able to show that DGAT-1-2 is functional in C. reinhardtii as it modifies the lipid profile in these engineered strains.
To find out more about how our engineered system works, visit our Demonstrate page.