Team:Wageningen UR/Achievements
Achievements
While working hard on our project, we always kept the medal criteria in mind. We are now happy to announce that we have met all criteria to get a gold medal. We hereby elaborate on our path to meet the medal criteria, and we provide links to the corresponding wiki pages where more details can be found.
Gold medal
- Integrated Human Practices
- Project Modeling
- Metabolic scale:
- Microbial scale:
- Biofilter scale:
- Education & Communication
- Excellence in Another Area
Integrated human practices were very important for the design of our project. We reached out to many groups of stakeholders including farmers, scientists, politicians and an expert on animal welfare. They gave us useful feedback which we used to further improve the design, science and implementation of our project.
To get a better understanding of three key aspects of our project, we made models of our project, each working on a different scale :
Nitrogen metabolism of combined nitrification and denitrification.
The dynamics of our biosafety circuit.
Biofilter size and performance.
We used the knowledge we gained by the modeling in designing our wetlab projects as is further explained on our engineering cycle page .
We believe that education and communication are crucial for the public understanding and acceptance of synthetic biology. With that in mind, we organized a junior science lab, gave many guest lectures at all educational levels and communicated about our project to the general public.
The last gold medal criteria we met is ‘Excellence in another area’. We discussed the ethics of our project with many people and described it on this page.
Silver medal
- Engineering Success
- Collaboration
- Human Practices
- Proposed Implementation
We went multiple times through the engineering cycle and described this on our engineering page.
To improve our software tool, the iGEM PIPE, we asked the Maastricht and Groningen teams for feedback and we did multiple troubleshooting sessions with the Eindhoven team. We also organized the Dutch meet-up and had other small collaborations with other teams. All of this is summarized on our collaborations page .
As described on our human practices page, we have been in contact with many stakeholders to discuss the importance of our project.
We explained how we could implement our project in the real world. Important aspects were the biofilter design, cost analysis and the use of a hood system.
Bronze medal
- Competition Deliverables
- Attributions
- Project Description
- Contribution
We made a beautiful wiki and presentation video and we filled in the judging form.
On our attributions page, we described what our team members did to contribute to our project and what other people did to help us achieve our goals.
We made a project description page on which you can find how and why we chose our project.
To contribute to future iGEM teams, we, amongst others, made a wikibase to help future iGEM teams search through the Part’s Registry. On top of that, we developed a software tool, the iGEM PIPE, which can help iGEM teams with their metabolic engineering projects. PIPE searches for genes and their functions in online databases, such as, the Part’s registry! Then it suggests which engineering strategies to use including knock-outs and knock ins.