Team:DTU-Denmark/Medal Criteria
Attributions
Our project is the result of teamwork and collaboration where everyone from the team has contributed with their individual expertise. Each team members contribution is described and can be found on our Attributions Page.
Project Description
We encourage you to check out our project description, where the project idea and the reasoning behind it is explained.
Contribution
We have worked in an uncommon chassis organism and our contribution to the iGEM community is a detailed workflow of how to work with our organism, Aspergillus niger, and a collection of parts for controlling the morphology of the organism.
Engineering success
We experienced engineering success in working with the morphology of Aspergillus niger. See how we successfully made our way through the engineering cycle on the engineering page.
Collaboration
Collaboration is a key part of the iGEM spirit. This year, we truly enjoyed working with teams from Korea, Mexico, and other places all around the world.
Human Practices
We believe that motivation is key to creating an important and responsible project and we surely have been motivated to create a project which hopefully can affect the world in a positive way. We have described the motivation behind the project on the Human practices page. We believe that a truly successful project iGEM must be grounded in a motivation to make a positive impact on the world. We described our sources of motivation on the Human Practices page.
Proposed Implementation
Throughout this project we have strived to create a project which can impact the biotechnology industry. A description of how our project relates to the industry is found on our implementation page.
Integrated Human Practices
To ensure that we never lost sight of making something which would be useful in the production industry, we gathered feedback from a range of stakeholders whose feedback impacted the direction of our project. We even managed to impress the world’s largest producer of enzymes. Read all about it on our Human practices page.
Project Modelling
This year our team created an image analysis tool which can analyze microscope pictures of hyphae and a model that can predict a fungal mycelium’s growth from a single spore. This was both useful for us and can be used by future teams and industry. We therefore highly encourage you to check it out
Proof of Concept
We detail how our work has shown that our project is viable and relevant on our Proof of Concept page, do check it out.
Science Communication
This year we made a tremendous effort to help produce educational material and promote the world of synthetic biology to a range of audiences. This work can be found on our Science Communication page.
Special prizes
We are nominating ourselves for the following special prizesEducation
We have endeavoured to engage a wide range of audiences in diverse ways. When we produced material intended for schools, we paid particular attention to align our content to recognized, sound pedagogical models as well as the Danish School and High School curricula.
Model
We have made a heavily data-based model in two parts: Morphologizer, an image analysis tool, and Mycemulator, a mycelium growth simulator. With these models, we have created a novel way to go from fungus to simulated mycelium which could be useful for industry stakeholders wanting to explore the mycelium-level consequences of changed morphological parameters.
Software
We present three excellent software tools: Morphologizer, Mycemulator, and SignalPrepper. For the best software tool prize, we nominate the morphology pipeline consisting Morphologizer and Mycemulator. We have endeavoured to produce software which is user-friendly and useful to stakeholders in academia and industry.
Integrated Human Practices
Extensive research was performed into how to choose and implement our project so that it would be interesting to a range of stakeholders and have a positive impact on the world. Throughout the project, consultation with stakeholders influenced almost every aspect of our project.
Best part collection
Our collection of parts for modifying the morphology of Aspergillus niger is substantial and novel in the iGEM part registry. We have shown the usefulness of this collection through our wetlab experiments and worked to carefully document our parts in the registry. We hope that our parts will benefit iGEM teams for many years to come.