Team:RUM-UPRM/Judging/Pages for Awards
Click the box headers to reach their respective award page!
Bronze
The Attributions page includes all the participants, contributors and advisors in our project.
The Description page summarizes our project’s main idea, the problem, our inspiration and proposed solution.
The Contributions page presents new parts submitted and education strategies that may be used by future iGEM teams.
Silver
This page contains the workflow that we followed for the conceptualization, design and execution of our project.
This page records all the collaborations that we participated in with other iGEM teams. We had a total of 11 collaborations during this cycle.
This page explains how we determined that our work is good for the world, takes into consideration safety concerns, our community’s response to our project, meetings held with professionals and the involvement of other students with our project through education.
This page presents our proposed solution to the problem, safety precautions to take into consideration and additional challenges regarding maintenance and supervision of our biorreactor.
Gold
This page shows the people involved in the improvement in our project’s purpose and design.
This page presents our proposed proof of concept and expected results of each of the devices.
This page includes several initiatives such as: our Syn Bio 101 Summer Camp for High School Students, our Synthetic Biology Week, our High School Science Fair, our High School Interns Program, a Synthetic Biology Workshop for kids and a Seminar for High School Students.
This page includes our Inclusivity ideas based on the American Sign Language for everyone; some of these are: a dictionary of Synthetic Biology and several workshops offered for students and members of the community.
Awards
Track Awards
Best Environment Project
Our project focused on the possible restoration of the contaminated Anones Lagoon with RDX. A possible solution to contaminated water sites that could help the local biome, diversity, soil quality, and even prevent this harsh molecules trespassing to seawater.
Special Prizes
We focused on presenting workshops and activities about synthetic biology to a variety of students from highschool to undergraduate. It was important to present the audience to all the opportunities and diversity of applications this science offers.
Our inclusion was making a dictionary for the sign language community with synthetic biology concepts, and workshops to learn the basics of sign language focused on commonly used words in biology and sparking the interest of learning sign language to other students. We not only shared our knowledge with others, but also discussed our project and received criticism from different professors; such as, Lorenzo Salicetti who is a chemical engineer, Adrian González an activist who shared knowledge about public approach, Sandra Maldonado who focuses on mycology studies, among others. All the diverse identities of these persons helped shape our project and exchange valuable information.
Our public approach to the citizens of Vieques was a great input to the direction of our project because of the reality they shared with us. We tried to share their reality to a broad range of people to create conscience through workshops, presentations, and activities. While sharing conscience, we also continued to work on a faster alternative and a possible solution to this environmental crisis.
Best New Basic Part: xplA, xplB, algD promoter
Our team codon-optimized the promoter algD’s sequence for a better function the presence of RDX. We also worked on the separation of xplA and xplB sequences, and with the modification xplA encodes for a flavodoxin domain fused at the N-terminus of a P450 cytochrome, while the xplB gene encodes for a partner flavodoxin reductase.
Our team adapted algD promoter, LuxI and LuxR, and mCherry to work as composite device 1 and be a bio-detector for RDX. We also adapted Luxpr promoter, xplB, xplA, and amilGFP to work as device 2 for RDX biodegradation
Best Presentation
The presentation is organized, well explained, and visually appealing.
Safety and Security Award: Safety at the Laboratory, Safety in Proposed Implementation in Bioreactor and Genetic Circuit
Detailed in the safety tab at our wiki page are all precautions and rules that each member had to follow related to laboratory procedures; such as, the covid protocol and regulated access to laboratory by previous training. Safety was also taken into consideration in the proposed work plan by ensuring there are no leaks of the processed contaminants contained in the bioreactor. In the proposed implementations we also integrated a device 3 in our genetic circuit to serve as a killswitch.
Community Awarded Prizes
The promotional video is at the home page of our wiki. The clips used and the voice over were done in a creative way explaining the reason for our project.