Project Determination

At the beginning our team season, every member gets to present possible project ideas. Follow this initial meeting, we spend the next couple of weeks flushing out the ideas in groups in more detail, looking into primary literature, designing possible experiments, and sourcing required materials. We then present these ideas again before selecting the project. To select our team project this year, we wanted to conduct quantitative and qualitative analysis, so that we could come to a consensus in an efficient and fair manner.

To achieve this, we created a template for project selection that we used to evaluate all of our potential projects. The assessments were based on the criteria described in the iGEM judging guide, project assessment documentation from previous iGEM teams’ wikis, and anything else we felt is was import to evaluate.

Each team member was asked to score different qualities of the project (novelty, feasibility, interest, applications, and usefulness) and back up their quantitative evaluation with written comments. With the diverse disciplines amongst our team, we received input from a science, mathematics, engineering and business perspective. This analysis was then presented to our advisors to ensure that we had not overlooked any relevant aspect in our consideration.

Below we have included our general guide template with the justification for our choices in criteria, as well as our team’s evaluation of all the projects we pitched. This evaluation resulting in our team’s selection of this year’s project, the functional prion project now called: Prions be Lit - Functional Amyloid as a Biological Tool.

Project Selection Guide

Primary Criteria: evaluates the viability of a project

Novelty

If the proposed project was likely to fall under the Foundational Advance track, we added an additional primary criteria. The basis of this track is to develop novel solutions to technical problems, thus the novelty of the project was one of the priorities.

Feasibility

When developing project ideas, teams must also consider the amount of resources available to them. It is important to be able to achieve their goals with the resources, time, and technical abilities they have to ensure the project is completed and finished on time.

Secondary Criteria: evaluates benefits of selecting a particular idea as an iGEM project.

Interest

The level of interest amongst the members in a project is valuable as a teams with a greater interest in their project are like more likely to excel and be successful.

Applicability of the team

It is important to select a project that will enable all subteams to contribute to the project and fulfill medal criteria.

Usefulness

How useful the project is and how it may impact society (the degree of stakeholder benefit and how many stakeholders would gain this benefit).

Following the team analysis, the project proposals were presented to advisors from the University of Waterloo’s Faculties of Biology and Math. Advisors from the University of Waterloo Faculty of Biology: Brian Ingalls, Trevor Charles, Barbara Moffatt, Andrew Doxey, and Forbes Burkowski. Their feedback and expertise was acknowledged and factored into our project decision as well.

Criteria Weighting (out of 5)

Interest - /2 Application to Subteam - /3 Novelty - /5 *For Foundational Advancements only Usefulness - /2 Impact - /2 Feasibility - / 5

Conclusion:

In conclusion, the Waterloo iGEM 2017 team has decided to select the engineered prion project for this year.