As part of the coordination efforts for the competition, several meetings were held with diverse professors from the University of Puerto Rico at Mayaguez. Through these meetings, we explored means to optimize the proposed logistics of the competition, and received feedback from the faculty members. The first meeting occurred with the Mechanical Engineering professor, Dr. Ruben Diaz, and the second with Dr. Patricia Ortiz-Bermudez and Dr. Carlos Ríos-Velázquez. After the exchanging of ideas between our team and the professors, we adopted a few guidelines that were not considered before, like: design restrictions, designing softwares tools, and biochemical presumptions. The meetings resulted in better coordination of the competition, improving the communications between the participants and the coordinators of the competition.
Team:RUM-UPRM/Design Competition
Bioreactor Design for Synthetic Biology Applications
The competition Bioreactor Design for Synthetic Biology Applications emerged as an educational effort during the aftermath of the Virtual SYNBIO 101 CAMP. After watching the presentation of the high school students, it became clear that there are, indeed, numerous people and students interested in the progress of Synthetic Biology in Puerto Rico.
Bioreactor Design for Synthetic Biology Applications seeks a collaborative platform where local students from the University of Puerto Rico at Mayagüez propose a bioreactor design that complements the genetic systems generated by the iGEM-RUM-UPRM team. The main goals of the competition are:
1. Teach synthetic biology to students unrelated to the emerging field.
2. Introduce the iGEM-RUM-UPRM team to the engineering principles and applications in the Synthetic Biology field.
3. Collaborate with local students from engineering fields to generate conceptual designs of bioreactors for bioremediation facilitated by synthetic bacteria.
4. Receive and offer feedback from the participants about the proposed project.
5. Accomplish Integrated Human Practices by evaluating, optimizing and endorsing some of the resulting concepts designs from the competition.
Dr. Carlos Ríos-Velázquez, Dr. Patricia Ortiz-Bermúdez, and members of iGEM-RUM-UPRM offered a series of 4 introductory workshops. Through a weekend, we addressed synthetic biology topics, bioremediation systems, mechanical engineering concepts, chemical engineering theory, as well as the iGEM-RUM-UPRM 2020 project. After the workshops, three office hours periods were conducted by the iGEM-RUM-UPRM team. Questions, doubts and comments from the participants were answered and discussed.
The total of three participants and each one had a distinct academic background. Fernando J. Vázquez Cosme is a mechanical engineering student, Adriana F. Arroyo Fernández is an industrial microbiology student, and Ricardo Y. Román Ortiz is an industrial biotechnology student. Each participant was evaluated by our designed rubrics. The deliverables were: a 500 words descriptive-essay summarizing their designs, and a 5-minutes oral presentation referring to their projects.
Fig. 1. Rubric for the evaluation of the description and design of the bioreactor.
Fig. 2. Rubric for the evaluation of the oral presentations explaining the bioreactor functionality and rationale.
Competition's Finalist
Future Projections
As a result of the competition, every initial goal was fulfilled. Undergraduate students who had never heard from the Synthetic Biology field were introduced to this emerging science, and were capable of analyzing genetic systems in order to design their proposed bioreactor concepts. At the same time, students from our research team iGEM RUM UPRM- were introduced to the principles of the engineering and synthetic biology interphase, and were able to evaluate the proposed bioreactor concept designs. A collaborative initiative emerged between the participants of the competition, iGEM RUM UPRM students, and faculty members from diverse science fields. Respecting the technical aspects of the proposed bioreactor concepts, both finalists centered their projects around the bioremediation of mercury. Nevertheless, Fernando’s design took an in-situ approach, whereas Adriana’s concept was an ex-situ. Adriana’s project resulted in the most achievable and feasible concept, thus, in the winner of the competition. Both finalists are interested in continuing in collaboration with the iGEM-RUM-UPRM team, hence deriving an organic recruiting pipeline for the research team. As an effort to engineer success for the second phase, both designs will be optimized with the provided feedback from the evaluation committee, and an at-scale proof of concept is strongly recommended to confirm or deny the functionality of the resulting bioreactor design.