The creation and shaping of the international team and the Friendzymes Project was born out of an
online class with more than 400 people from around the world; this unique beginning causes
Friendzymes’ Integrated Human Practices to be a little unusual when compared to many other iGEM
teams. This project was created by the community for the community.
After beginning in the class,
Friendzymes has evolved into a team with people from 10 countries on 5 of the 7 continents of the
world, and is constantly mixing with the knowledge and enthusiasm great researchers and
bio-enthusiasts not of our team have for Synthetic Biology. Our vision is to build a frugal
biofoundry, to bring the technology and application of biological sciences to the level of the
community, and to make friends — as our name suggests! By working with various communities, we can
achieve our vision.
The seed of the Friendzymes Project was born in August 2020 in the Frugal Science online class taught
by Bioengineering Assistant Professor Manu Prakash from Stanford University. Manu is a
world-renowned, innovative scientist whose work focuses on frugal innovations to make medicine,
computing, and microscopy accessible to more people across the world.
The spirit of the class was for people to come together during hopeless times, such as the pandemic,
and try to look at the bigger picture, define world problems, and discuss potential solutions. This
class had two parts: frugal engineering guest lecturers and group projects where students united
based on similar interests. This built an international community of those wanting to tackle
problems of our times. The global issue of democratizing biotechnology was raised and the solution
of tackling it via enzyme production was proposed by Isaac Larkin, a team leader of the Friendzymes
project.
When thinking about this issue, Isaac wondered what we would need to build in order to frugally build
a bio lab. He was already working on an Open Enzyme collection for COVID diagnostics and this idea
was a broader scheme of frugal biotech. The things he thought might be necessary were: “a frugal
bioreactor for culturing microbes to manufacture enzymes and other biological reagents, a frugal
thermocycler for copying/amplifying DNA (and incubating reactions at set temperatures); a frugal
pipette to enable people to do liquid handling and set up reactions in the lab; a frugal
electrophoresis apparatus aimed at measuring the weight of molecules; a frugal optical measurement
device for probing the structure of molecules; a frugal French Press instrument, for popping cells
and accessing their intracellular contents; a frugal centrifuge like paperfuge or handyfuge, for
separating heavy/insoluble materials and liquids from less dense and soluble solutions; and at least
two ideas devoted to cheap manufacturing of enzymes/biomolecular reagents required to perform
biochemical/biotechnological reactions and transformations. This is a great start on a roadmap for
building a frugal bio lab. To summarize, we'll need: (1) frugal ways to grow cells and make
wetware/reagents, (2) frugal ways to set up reactions, (3) frugal ways to
separate/concentrate/purify things, (4) frugal ways to run reactions at specific temperatures, and
(5) frugal ways to measure the results of experiments, including potentially the
size/structure/concentration of molecules, cells and product materials.” - Isaac L
The scope of this problem was very large and further discussions with others as a part of the class
helped to prune out the unnecessary goals and focus on the most important thing, frugal bioreactors.
Leron Perez, a graduate student from Stanford University, who was part of the class, strongly
suggested that a frugal bioreactor will be one of the most important components in this pursuit. We
explored the diverse frugal bioreactor designs and decided it would be an important component in the
pipeline we would set up. For information regarding our progress on the frugal bioreactor, check out
our Hardware section.
Divij Kinger, a former member of the team, is a Biotech/Genetic Engineer who was working on Gene
Drives to prevent transmission of Dengue in mosquitoes, saw the need to store, transport, and use
plasmids, DNAs, and enzymes as a necessary component of any biolab. He suggested that minimizing
transportation barriers would help local communities in making and sharing biological constructs
among themselves. Therefore, we started looking for organisms that can withstand uncertain
environmental factors and can be easily shipped.
Luckily, we were able to talk to Keoni Gandall, who had a solution ready because he ran a company
that specialized in creating genes and packaging them as spores to the end consumer. It seemed
magical without having to deal with any storage facility where you can mail your genetic constructs
because the spores can be transferred to paper. The only catch was that protein production wasn’t
very abundantly done in Bacillus subtilis, the organism forming those spores. The standard was, and
is, Escherichia coli because everyone has been thinking of ways to make protein production better in
E. coli, instead of thinking out of the box and going with less conventional model organisms.
Another benefit of B. subtilis was that the cells didn’t have to be popped, this reduces the
hardware component estimates that our (Isaac’s) crude idea began with.
We had brainstorming sessions with Manu Prakash which helped to narrow down our project into looking
for
the harder tasks. He suggested that quantifying and purifying the production of our enzymes would be
a
critical aspect, as well as building a frugal chromatographic column. We were very excited when we
got
to speak to Dushanth Seervaratnam, who had built a frugal chromatography column purifying based on
Silica tags which can be readily, and frugally, made from Sand.
Much of our understanding about the important parts of the project came through interacting with
others who were just as passionate about biotech as we are. Also, many of the initial team members
didn’t know anything about biotechnology, but conversations with Scott (our PI) helped many learn
about plasmids and gene editing.
When the Frugal Science class ended, a lot of people dropped off the team due to other commitments;
however, 6 members of the class continued to collaborate and built Friendzymes, which has since
become a very dynamic team as more people from different communities got excited about this idea.
Clearly, we needed to tackle this problem globally, instead of in a specific region.
As we thought about how to push our team to the global scale, iGEM seemed like the best platform to
showcase our interests, so we joined iGEM 2021!
The Frugal Science class was over, but our team's journey continued. We have discussed the
project with many people since then, only now in a more iGEM-driven manner, to develop the best
possible project. From here, we have categorized individual collaborations by theme.