We have successfully completed Bronze and Silver medal criteria. We have also completed 5 Gold medal requirements.
We are thrilled to announce that our team has won the Gold Medal and has been nominated for the Best Supporting Entrepreneurship award!
Bronze Medal Criteria
Competition Deliverables: Registered for iGEM, had a great summer planning and developing our project despite the unusual nature of this year. Produced all the relevant competition deliverables including wiki, project promotion video and judging form. We plan to present our poster and 20 minute video at the virtual jamboree.
Attributions: Allocated tasks depending on the strengths of our team members, our team is quite small so some every aspect of our project was produced through mutual collaboration from all team members. To read how others beyond our team helped our project visit our attributions page.
Project Description: Our project was insipred by the striking and unusual tactic employed by Hippopotomi to protect themselves from UV radiation. Read more about this here.
Contribution: This year we thought outside the box for our contribution and we decided to produce our Essential Entrepreneurship Learning Resource. This resource will teach key entrepreneurship skills to future iGEM teams to help them explore the possibility of a start-up and examine their project from a new angle. This was done in response to challenges we encountered when attempting entrepreneurship ourselves. We have also produced a meta-analysis of previous iGEM wikis, our Wiki Study to determine characteristics that increase the success of that Wiki. Future iGEM teams will be able to look at these results and use them to guide their Wiki building.
Silver Medal Criteria
Engineering Success: We have provided a detailed description of our approach, to Synthetic Biology and our project, following the application of the Design-Build-Test cycle as measure of success. More information here.
Collaboration: This year we collaborated with the Heidelberg team to produce our Wiki meta analysis. The Heidelberg team performed the relevant web scraping while our team conducted statistical analysis and completed the formal write up. Read more here.
Human Practices: Our project helps to rescue marine coral ecosystems by reducing the oxidative stress corals experience. This will allow corals to better support the marine life that lives there. We have considered the wider impact of our project through the lens of the sustainable development goals, we used these goals to guide our project development to ensure it has a far reaching positive impact. We have acted responsibly by clarifying identified areas of consumer confusion to ensure known mechanisms of sunscreen failure do not impact the use of our project. We integrated opinions and values from key stakeholders in our gold medal criteria to ensure we produce a project that is responsible and good for the world. If you would like to see more of our human practices please visit this page Human Practices.
Proposed Implementation: This year we conducted extensive market research and produced a full Business Plan that demonstrates the implementation of our project in the real world. This includes proposed users, possible formulations of HippoSol, safety considerations and different possible strategic business models
Gold Medal Criteria
Integrated Human Practices: This year we conducted a variety of stakeholder interviews to integrate their values and preferences into our project. We also performed a media analysis of YouTube videos to reach a global cohort of stakeholder opinions. We integrated discussions surrounding issues faced by people of colour into our project design to ensure all voices are represented. The themes identified throughout this work made us consider our project from new angles including prioritizing key design elements such as low retail price, large range of shade options and being transparent with our communication. You can read more about our integrated human practices here.
Project Modelling: We successfully applied an innovative computational retrosynthesis approach to propose a biosynthetic pathway for the production of Hipposudoric Acid, applying advanced tools such as Retropath2.0, Selenzyme and r2paths. We have performed a Flux Balance Analysis using the Cobra Toolbox v3.0 on MATLAB to examine the function of the proposed novel pathway in the context of the E. coli metabolism to predict optimal growth conditions. Read more about our modelling here.
Proof of Concept: Due to limitations caused by the coronavirus our project this year relies on a dry lab proof of concept. We have successfully proposed a biosynthetic pathway for the production of Hipposudoric Acid using various computational methods to aid in our pathway design such as, Retropath2.0, Selenzyme and r2paths. This pathway was then validated using organic chemistry techniques to complete the reaction. Our host institution then assembled our pathway in E. coli resulting in red and brown agar plates suggesting that Hipposudoric Acid was successfully produced!
Partnership: This year we have partnered with St. Andrews due to the similarity of our projects. Our shared goal was to identify and contact key stakeholders to ensure their values and opinions were integrated into both projects. We also committed to the mutual sharing of raw survey data to validate and expand our human practices. Finally we held an online webinar to mentor the St. Andrews team on the sun care market and entrepreneurial skills allowing them to consider this side of their project. This mutually beneficial communication between the two teams continued for the entire duration of both projects. Read more about our partnership here.
Exellence in another area: This year we have expanded the horizon of our project to include extensive entrepreneurship work. We have performed key market analyses such as segmentation and characterisation of potential consumers. We have considered how resistant our project design is to direct and indirect competition and identified the specific external factors that will influence our business model. This work allowed us to transform a synthetic biology concept into a feasible, real world product that will be used by everyday people. Read more about our entrepreneurship here.
