Register and Attend: We’ve packed our bags for Boston and hope to enjoy our first Giant Jamboree as a team.
Team Wiki: Our wiki is complete, with the standard pages under the iGEM logo fulfilling all the requirements posted and submitted before the Nov. 1st deadline
Project Attributions: Check out our Attributions page under the team tab! We’ve thanked our collaborators, advisors, teachers, and associates for the achievements we’ve had during this year’s competition.
Team Poster: We look forward to presenting our poster at the Giant Jamboree, it was a pleasure designing and crafting the story behind our project through this poster.
Team Presentation: We look forward to presenting on the subject of PAH’s and how we can degrade them through innovations in synthetic biology.
Safety Forms: Completed all of the safety forms, including the Safety Check-in,both About our Lab forms, and the Final Safety Form.
Judging Form: We’ve completed a judging form that we’ve linked at the bottom of this page
Registry Part Pages: We’ve submitted our parts to iGEM under the judging form, this year we submitted 6 individual parts to the BioBrick registry.
Interlab: We completed this year’s interlab, with our results listed under the interlab tab
Collaboration: We collaborated with 4 different teams, detailed information and pictures can be found under our collaboration tab, but we meet the requirements of seeking mentors across the world, from Nebraska to Kazakhstan. With each collaboration, we sought to find ways to connect our project ideas, and to find parallels between how we could improve our projects to connect them to the community and to human practices.
Human Practices: We made sure our project made a significant impact on the community as a whole, with a variety of stem days, outreach activities, and our very own iGEM summer camp. We introduced the idea of synthetic biology into the curriculum of local elementary schools and went to a variety of meetings with industry professionals, from BP, Exxon, Synthetic Genomics, and even a representative from Argonne National Laboratories. We used our project as a catalyst for increasing awareness of the nuances of biological research, and we made sure we talked to experts in the field to ensure our project was viable and potentially implementable.
Gold
Integrated Human Practices: Taking the advice of the scientists we talked to, we used their techniques and guidance to improve our testing procedures. PAH’s and bioremediation are fairly niche topics, so we sought out industry professionals like Roger Prince, who invented bioremediation as a concept, and talked to BP, who likewise deal with these kinds of crises regularly. Their insight into how we could test nonpolar, generally insoluble materials in a biological setting was key to how we formatted our entire testing protocol.
Improving the function of a BioBrick: We took pSB3K3, and replaced the origin of replication with an Rk2 to generate a shuttle vector that can be replicated and expressed in a wider range of bacterial vectors. This resulted in the creation of BBa_K2491030.
Modelling: We did an intensive modelling of the degradation pathways and mechanisms behind our project’s degradation of fluorene, naphthalene, and phenanthrene using Pymol and the Swiss
Model softwares. The models can be found under our Model page.
Demonstration: Our project was demonstrated to be effective by a demo experiment we conducted. More details can be found under the Demo tab.
