We took our market research, and all of the work we have done previously to improve our project, working on the data we collected from the surveys, the interviews and the data extraction. Moreover we took in consideration, the professional feedback we received from the fablabs and makerspaces owners to improve our biomaterial 3D printer design every step of the way.

Aside from the market research, we seek advice from professionals linked to our project and interviewed them to discuss our project and asking them the right questions.

Finally, we produced a study about fundamental research, to understand how our work would impact various scientific field, expanding from synthetic biology.

We decided to enter and discover the makerspace and fablab community by investigating first-hand as we went to more than 10 fablabs and interviewed the owners as well as the regular customers. We conducted the interviews with the same standard questionnaire in order to have valid data we can work on to make our market research.

We shot over 4 hours of footage, and reduced it to a video of 18 minutes, that summarize well the challenges facing the Fablab and Makerspace community as well as the use of a 3D printer.

Thanks to our primary research, we listened to all of the concerns that was mentioned by the general public as well as professionals. Safety issue was the most important one. Therefore we integrated a cell lysis system in our design. It is easy to activate the lysis in the cell and kill it.

We wrote a safety dossier regarding our meeting with the Dr.Namorado, to insure our subject is in compliance with the EU’s Horizon 2020 ethical criteria.
Here is the link to the Safety Dossier

To improve our work, we talked to scientists and professionals that gave us a real input on our project. All of the interviews were very informative, and most importantly gave us an opportunity to explore further in detail our work, thanks to the advice of external people, giving us a new eye on the project.

Optogenetics is closely linked to neurology as activating individual neurones by shining lights allow for a fine resolution mapping of the function of the nervous system.

Conditions of the microenvironment are key to determining cell fate and small changes result in large variation of the morphology of a mature organism. Although large advances have been made in the field of developmental biology thanks to higher resolution imaging, a lot remains to be understood about the underlying molecular mechanisms and signal diffusion interactions. Being able to dictate specific 3D locations of activation of genes determining developmental processes would allow a more comprehensive overview of each gene and the mechanisms of interactions between them.

Hence, we thought that by using our tools to light activate certain cells within an organism for targeted gene expression, we could observe the effect of the signal at different spatial resolutions. Furthermore, the field of developmental biology is spans all organisms and is studied in depth in a large variety of model organisms. The modularity of our tools allow for them to be implemented in many different organisms.

Colonising and travelling to different planets and maybe one day different solar systems is one of manhoods dream. Medusa also likes to dream big and we believe that applying 3D control in synthetic biology for space is crucial to success. To build materials in space, it would be very useful to use microbial cultures, as they could easily be transported and then grown into specific structures with lights and space resources. They would be produced in bioreactors that would shield them from hostile environments, such as the radiation and - voila! Space could be built up sustainably using Medusa and we wouldn’t have to transport large building blocks from earth. We shared our ambition with John Cumbers, who was intrigued about our project. He explained in details the different parameters that have to be taken into account if you are thinking of growing microorganism in space.

Speeding up Microbial production in industry remains one of the main challenges in bio-technological industry. One of the problems influencing this is the lack of control of enzyme diffusion within the cell and having high enough concentration of enzymes. By applying 3D control of enzymes within a cell using Medusa’s RNA organelle, we can create local concentrations of enzymes which could vastly speed up enzymatic pathways of production leading to higher yields and faster production.

Medusa’s light control could also be applied in Industry, where different processes could be installed in a single bioreactor using modular light patterns, this would allow for more efficiency and multi-level processes to be organised into one space.

Co-cultures have become one of synthetic biology’s most promising methods for reducing metabolic loads and creating large networks. To best understand interactions between two populations and spatial interactions between them, we propose using Medusa’s optogenetic control to spatially activate expression in certain areas of certain strains to best understand interactions of co-cultures. We talked to the Imperial College 2016 iGEM team about our project and our ambition to study Co-Cultures, they were very interested in our project and they shared precious information concerning their data.