Team:Chalmers-Gothenburg

iGEM Chalmers Gothenburg 2020

No Time To Waste - iGEM Chalmers Gothenburg

Generating 70 million tonnes of textile waste each year, the fashion industry oftentimes goes unmentioned in the climate debates. Yet, the great environmental problem posed by the fashion persists and is further aggravated by the inclusion of synthetic textile blends, which renders a large portion of garments un-recyclable. Our teams’ attempt at tackling this problem focuses on the addition of the synthetic fibre elastane to garments, an addition that makes fibre separation a difficult process, and as such, poses a large problem for recycling. By including nine different enzymes to the bacteria E. Coli, our team attempted to create an enzymatic system capable of degrading the elastane fibre through biological means, effectively providing a biological solution to an environmental problem. A large part of our project has also been to communicate this large waste impact of the fashion industry, and to show that we really have No Time to Waste.

Human Practices

Our project would not have gotten as far as it did without the valuable insights we gained from society & industry. From the start Human Practices was an integral part of our process, helping us to define our goals and further our progress towards them.
Here you can read more about what we’ve done to for Sustainable work in our project, the Educational Outreach and our aim at the Sustainable Development Goal targets. 

You will also find our Integrated Human Practices work where you will see how our project was modified to accommodate the needs that we learned about talking to industry, our government and many others. Visit human practices »

Wet Lab

As the name reveals, wet lab is the hands-on laboratory work. Let us guide you through each step of how we designed our genetic constructs and the establishment of an experimental plan in the design section. Here we also outline details about the Elastane degradation pathway and propose future directions related to our project. Once you’ve grasped the overall wet lab design, dive into the results and measurements sections to see what achievements came out of all this. If you want to read more about a specific experiment, go to the Notebook section and check out the weekly notes and protocols.

Visit wet lab »

Dry Lab

In our dry lab work, we combined metagenomics, genome scale modeling and kinetic modeling. Through the insights from modeling the degradation process of the soft and hard segments, we gained ideas for our project in the wet lab. We also looked at the problem of plastic contamination at a bigger scale, and therefore explored data from different environments across the world to look for new enzymes that could degrade plastic. Go to the dry lab tab to get an overview, and go to the sections Metagenomics, GEM, Kinetic model or Reproducibility to find out what we did on each topic! Visit dry lab »

Project

Are you confused about where to start? This is the place! Read our project description and find out what our project is all about. What is the problem we are aiming towards solving? How do we intend to do it? We further elaborate the answer to the latter question in the implementation section and propose ways to further develop our project into a business idea. This tab is also where to find information about the parts we have used and submitted, as well as documentation about safety measures when working in the lab. Visit project page »

People

To learn more about our team or the people who helped us realize our project, press the link below. Visit people page »