Team:CLS CLSG UK/Next Steps

Team

People

Attributions

Inclusivity

Contribution

Human Practices

Human Practices

Implementation

Collaborations

Communication

Integrated Human Practices

Handbook Quizzes

Hardware

Background

Design

Cost analysis

Next steps

Modelling

Introduction

Cocaine diffusion

Enzyme concentration

Total Breakdown

Evaluation

Project

Description

Design

Engineering

Parts

Methods

Results

Next steps

• Next steps

Next steps

Due to coronavirus, labs around the United Kingdom were forced closed over summer. This meant that it became very difficult to perform any lab work for our hardware project. We attempted to order all our materials as soon as we returned to school, however, due to complications regarding funding our orders became even further delayed, and ultimately we were required to halt all experiments until after the jamboree. Due to our inability to complete our hardware, there are a number of further improvements we would have liked to make to our project. We also made a collaboration space below so that any teams in the future who will expand or make improvements to our project, can upload their results onto our wiki as well.

Future Improvements

• Our cocaine aptamer is very sensitive and is able to detect concentrations as low as 20nM. However, upon further investigation, we realised that even this is not sensitive enough. Although we used SWV in our project, which is extremely sensitive as it is, we considered using DPV (Differential Pulse Voltammetry) which is upto 1000 times more sensitive than SWV. As a high school team, performing DPV is very difficult and the equipment required is much more expensive. While DPV is currently not possible upon the Kickstat potentiostat, we believe that it would be a worthy challenge for a future graduate/undergraduate iGEM team to attempt modifying the Kickstat potentiostat to perform DPV
• Our current system requires retrieval of data from an SD card every 3 days. While this is indeed an improvement over previous projects, we believe that there is still room to improve further. If a wifi router is present close to site of sampling, data could be directly uploaded to a cloud, from which it could be accessed by an app
• Having to polish the electrodes every 3 days also acts as a potentially limiting factor. As part of some further experimentation, different electrodes (e.g. glassy carbon) can be used instead of gold electrodes to understand which electrodes provide accurate results for longer periods of time. This would reduce the frequency of maintenance which would make the aptasensor even more desirable as an in-situ biosensor.
• In order to increase portability further, we would have liked to integrate a microfluidics system into our device. As a high school, we could not perform plasma bonding and so creating microfluidic chips would have been slightly out of our breadth. However, a valuable further improvement upon our project would be the creation of a similar microfluidics based aptasensor (capable of SWV)