Team:Chalmers-Gothenburg/Medal Criteria

Medal Criteria

Our team achieved a silver medal for our iGEM 2021 project!



Medal Criteria we claimed to achieved


Bronze

Silver

Gold


Bronze criteria

Competition Deliverables


Attributions


Project Description


Contribution


Through RBS site characterization of parts: BBa_K3252027, BBa_K3252026 and BBa_J15001, we contributed to the iGEM community. Secondly, we have laid out a foundation for hosting the Nordic iGEM conference for future teams. Lastly, we also contributed with a code to make it easier and faster to upload files to the iGEM database.

See our Contribution page!


Silver Criteria

Engineering Success


We completed several rounds of the engineering cycle based on results from our modelling and laboratory experiments as detailed on the engineering page.

See our engineering page!

Collaboration


Our major collaborations consisted of a steady long-term partnership with Team: UNILausanne, and a shorter but intensive collaboration with Team: Linköping-Sweden, as well as many smaller short-term collaborations.

See our Collaboration page!

Human Practices


See our Human Practices!
By studying relevant scientific literature, we realised early on in our project the urgency of developing more sustainable manufacturing practises for fatty acids. This led us to obtain further information from stakeholder such as research- and industry specialists, as well as governmental representatives, confirming the relevance of our project design.

Proposed Implementation


Our team proposed that S. cerevisiae can be engineered to allow the fine-tuning of enzymatic reaction pathways in vivo, by utilising more sophisticated signalling systems than we used for our current project. To this extent we have during our project identified a number of enzymes that target fatty acids to convert them to a number of high-value derivatives.

See our Implementation page!

Gold Criteria

Integrated Human Practices


We made ethical and environmental considerations when deciding upon the topic of our project. We extensively researched fatty acid manufacturing processes from a sustainable perspective and propose solutions based on synthetic biology. Our findings and conclusions are presented both on our Human Practises page and also our Project Description page. During our research efforts, we contacted key stakeholders within the industry, government, and scientific community and incorporated their various perspectives into our project design.

See our Human Practices!

Project Modelling


We created a GEM-model of the intermediate YJZ045-strain and investigated how its growth differed from native yeast. Additionally, we also performed structural simulations predicting protein structures for the thioesterases.

See our modelling page!

Proof of Concept


We successfully benchmarked all three chemical induction systems using fluorescent proteins carried on individual plasmids and showed that the signal intensities changed for the different induction systems. It is reasonable to assume that the concept of thioesterase expression regulation, also is valid to work.

See our proof of concept page!

Partnership


The Transcriptome blog is our proud result of the extensive partnership with Team: UNILausanne, that started from the very beginning of the project and is still ongoing.

See our partnership page!

Education and Communication


In our education- and public communications initiatives we organized lectures for both high school- and university level students providing introductions to synthetic biology through our project design. Our lectures especially provided perspectives on the ethics of different synthetic biology application areas, and we were fortunate to be invited to have our presentation be made as a part of the second cycle course ‘Ethics in Biotechnology’ at Chalmers University of Technology. We organized The Nordic iGEM Conference as an open and public event by actively engaging and answering questions about synthetic biology in social media and live streamed the teams' presentations. During the length of the project we continuously communicated synthetic biology concepts in a semi-popularized format with our blog The Transcriptome.

See our Communication page!