Team:BOKU-Vienna/Medals
Medals
Bronze criteria
| Criterium | Description | Link |
|---|---|---|
| Competition Deliverables | We have delivered a presentation video, our wiki, and the judging form | |
| Attribution | We want to thank all our supporters throughout our iGEM journey! On this page you can read about them and their contribution to our project. | Attributions |
| Contributions |
We have provided four guides for future iGEM teams:
Additionally, we improved the documentation of existing parts in the registry:
| Contributions |
| Project Description | We gave an overview over our project and explained our way from the initial idea to the final results. | Project Description |
Silver criteria
| Criterium | Description | Link |
|---|---|---|
| Engineering Success | We successfully managed to clone our enzymes into L. plantarum. Furthermore, we successfully encapsulated bacteria in our scaffold and modified a capsule component to make it mucoadhesive. We developed a new plasmid backbone for the Type-II-S assembly system that works in E.coli as well as in Lactobacillus. | Engineering Success |
| Collaboration | We participated in several collaborations with other iGEM teams, and also started two collaborations ourselves:
| Collaboration |
| Human Practices | Since the beginning of our project, we continuously consulted experts on our approach and ideas. With their assistance, we made sure we were on the right track and made a valuable contribution to society. | Human Practices |
| Proposed Implementation | We thought a lot about our vision, and how our project could be implemented in the real world, with an extensive focus on safety. Our proposed implementation can be found on the respective wiki page. | Proposed Implementation |
Gold criteria
| Criterium | Description | Link |
|---|---|---|
| Education and Communication | To reach people from all walks of life and fascinate them for science, we approached the topic of Education and Science Communication in multiple ways: We held lessons about the microbiome and gastrointestinal disorders at multiple schools for children from different backgrounds, from primary school to high school age. We also were invited to talk about our project in the Science Busters’ podcast and posted educational posts on our social media. | Education and Communication |
| Integrated Human Practices | Our human practices efforts underwent the engineering cycle just like our lab work did. We continuously incorporated the input of experts, IBS patients and the public, which we got through interviews and a survey that we published. Examples for ways that our project was shaped by human practices include the switch from celiac disease to irritable bowel syndrome, our extensive biosafety concept, our efforts to use a rhetoric that would remove stigma from the disorder, and to educate about food sensitivities. | Integrated Human Practices |
| Partnership | We had a close partnership with this year’s iGEM team from TU-Eindhoven, who worked on a diagnosis method for inflammatory bowel disease. We helped each other throughout the year in various topics like human practices, lab work, modeling, and documentation. We want to thank them for the fantastic cooperation! | Integrated Human Practices |
| Proof of Concept | We were able to successfully express our fructan degrading enzymes in Lactobacillus and show their secretion. Additionally, we encapsulated bacteria within a biocontainer, demonstrate their retention & survival and thiolated the biocontainer in order to achieve mucoadhesion. Furthermore, we provided a kinetic model that showed that it is possible to sufficiently degrade fructans in the small intestine and at the same time not exceed the clinical treshold of fructans therein. | Proof of Concept |
| Project Modeling | We created a deterministic model for our project using SimBiology. In order to gain insight into the necessary amounts of enzyme to keep fructan concentrations below the clinical threshold, the optimal time of drug administration, the secretion rate and how enzyme modifications would impact the system. | Modeling |
