Team:Nottingham/Medals

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Awards and Medals

Bronze Medal

1. Registration and Giant Jamboree Attendance

Our iGEM 2020 team application was accepted by iGEM Headquarters on 2020-05-21.


2. Competition Deliverables

We have completed all the deliverables as follows:

  1. Wiki: You’ve already made it to our wiki! We hope you enjoy learning more about our project.
  2. Poster: Our poster will be released for judges to see on the 10th of November, ready for the Jamboree.
  3. Presentation: Our presentation will be uploaded by the 30th of October, ready for the Jamboree.
  4. Judging Form: Visit our Judging Form (here)!

3. Attributions

Take a look at our Team's Attributions page to see all the people it took to make this project happen.


4. Project Inspiration and Description

  1. Our project was founded by Luke Weir, who was inspired to use the gut brain access to treat neurodegenerative disease by his lectures.
  2. Our team was put together by the SBRC at the University of Nottingham, which is a world-class research department specialising in Clostridia. This expertise gave us the means to produce our biotherapeutic.
  3. The aim of our project is to genetically modify C. sporogenes to produce DBHB, a ketone which has been shown to have a neuroprotective effect.
  4. Since we were unable to access the lab this year, so used mathematical modelling to decide which pathways would give us the highest DBHB yield and how our biotherapeutic would colonise the gut.
  5. For further information, see our Description page.

5. Characterization / Contribution

We were unable to access the lab this year and so were unable to improve any existing parts or produce the new parts we have proposed in the lab. As our project was purely dry lab based, we improved on the genomic model of C. sporogenes started last year, making it more accurate and powerful as well as developing new models to inform our project. We were still determined to make a further contribution to future iGEM teams. We decided that with the new way of working ushered in by COVID-19 that podcasts would be a powerful outreach and education tool for iGEM teams for years to come. To help future iGEM teams we produced a guide to making professional podcasts. You can find more information on our Contributions page.

Silver Medal

1. Engineering Success

  1. The experiments for our project have be designed using the fundamental principles of synthetic biology and the engineering design cycle: research, design, build, test, learn, improve and research of our sporulation methods, synthetic pathways and control mechanisms.
  2. Experiments to build and test have been planned, unfortunately with the lab being closed to us, we can only plan for potential unexpected results!
  3. Our supervisors have been telling us about the (many) potential unexpected results we would expect with a lab based project, here we will detail our workflow and the most common problems we would likely face and the potential solutions!
  4. We have planned our lab work to be carried out in the three subgroups, DBHB, Control and Administration with design informed by our Modelling team!
  5. Have a look at our Engineering page for all the details.

2. Collaboration

We collaborated with several other iGEM teams to form great relationships!

  1. Kings College London: Both the teams met up virtually several times to organise a Therapeutics meetup in which we aimed to spread awareness about our project and motivation behind it and the potential of synthetic biology to deal with real world problems. This meetup provided invaluable feedback on everything from our presentation design to how we could improve the way our project is communicated to the public. Additionally, they were also guests in our student led podcast in which we discussed more about their project and other light-hearted topics.
  2. Paris Bettencourt Team (University of Paris): Worked with them to promote both of the team’s social media accounts. On our part, we uploaded their survey on our Instagram handle and encouraged our followers to take part in the survey as a way to help them out. They also attended our podcast in which they not only discussed more about their project but also gave their views and advice on how to work as a team in such unforeseen circumstances.
  3. University of Warwick: The University of Warwick’s project dealt with such a pertinent topic especially during this time that we had to have them on our podcast. We were able to learn a great deal about the leading cause of death within the UK and how their project could potentially deal with that.
  4. University of Southern Denmark: With their presence in the media being invited to a local news channel to talk about their project, we were able to not only find out more about the inspiration behind their project but we were also able to learn ways in which to improve our podcast from a technical viewpoint.

3. Human Practices

  1. We reached out to working professionals in fields related to our project to get advice from them, on the ways in which we could improve and reach out to a larger demographic every step of the way!
  2. We engaged with stakeholders who helped make our project more responsible and beneficial for the proposed potential consumers.
  3. We documented how we have investigated the issues with our project, the reasons for the questions and methods chosen, what we've learned and the impact of the project's success.
  4. Have a look at our Human Practices page for all the details.

4. Proposed implementation

  1. We wrote up reviews of the laws and regulations around bringing a biotherapeutic into the market
  2. Looked into the safety aspects focussing primarily on ethanol production, escape into the environment, keto acidosis, health conditions (diabetes and kidney disease) and horizontal gene transfer.
  3. Used information from the meetings with working professionals to understand the dosage, way of administration etc.

Gold Medal

1. Integrated Human Practices

  1. We worked on a literature review with the aim of educating ourselves with the usage of existing biotherapeutics and the way in which individuals respond.
  2. We didn't feel that it was enough to simply listen to what the professionals had to say.
  3. In fact, our confidence in our work led us to apply for the Integrated Human Practises prize! You can read more in the Special Prizes section below.
  4. Visit our Human Practices page to see how we shaped our project around the excellent advice we were given.

2. Modelling

  1. We used both structural and dynamic models to decide which pathways to choose for our bacteria as well as how those pathways would function.
  2. We built on a C. sporogenes genome from the previous year’s team, improving it and adapting it to our project.
  3. The modelling subgroup worked closely with all the other subgroups to inform their work throughout.
  4. Key impacts include: identifying the effect of acid and ethanol on DBHB production, kinetic modelling of the ABE fermentation pathway and identifying the conditions needed for DBHB production.
  5. For More information, see our Modelling page.

3. Science Communication

  1. We produced a Minecraft world designed to educate kids and teenagers about synthetic biology from their homes while in lockdown.
  2. We produced a series of podcasts targeting an older audience, getting into more of the interesting detail of our projects and those of our guest teams.
  3. We encouraged a flow of communication between the public and our team through our reddit page linked with the Minecraft project and through our social media, where we took questions from our followers and answered them in our podcasts.
  4. We created a selection Q&A videos, covering a variety of key areas of synthetic biology which can be accessed on Youtube, or our wiki's Outreach page.