Achievement
INTEGRATED HUMAN PRACTICES
To explore the viability of Phosphostore in a real-world setting, we consulted major stakeholders in the water industry. The detailed insights into the practices of innovation management in the water industry, in addition to our exploration on intellectual property, scale-up and legislation informed our extensive business plan. They also inspired our international collaboration with other iGEM teams to generate a worldwide legislation map. Consultation with stakeholders has also led us to perform additional experiments on the thermal stability of our PPK, to show the feasibility of applying Phosphostore devices in a domestic setting.
MODELLING
Computational modelling guided our project in three major areas: 1) Continuous culture modelling allowed us to estimate the yearly cost of treating wastewater using Phosphostore. As a result we performed a major re-design of the intended device. 2) We used an innovative ensemble modelling approach to predict the operating characteristics of our phosphate starvation operon as a regulatory system for controlling microcompartment synthesis. 3) We used statistical Design of Experiments (DoE) to optimize the expression of PPK. Two rounds of DoE enabled us to identify the optimal conditions for expression. DoE was also used to identify the optimum conditions for microcompartment expression.