Achievements

This year has been a very special edition for Team iGEM Toulouse as for many teams in the world. We were on the lucky side, having access to the lab this summer and so being able to perform experiments. On the downside, we suffered a lot from the sanitary situation, which impacted our day-to-day routine. Sometimes in obvious ways with masks, social distancing, quarantine when contamination was suspected or lock-out reasons. Sometimes insidiously with strong difficulties for our supervisors to assist us, delayed orders or a certain distrust for “this group of students that is still here, browsing around”…

We suppose that our achievements this year make sense in such a deleterious context. We have done incredible things in the Human Practice part of our project, things we could never have hoped to dream about when we engaged in iGEM. Imagine ! We created a project about Space from scratch, without any of us nor our supervisors being any kind of expert about it. And we were taken very seriously by top notch scientists from the CNES ! We ended up being invited to share coffees with real Astronauts, or being treated as guest-stars in the Toulouse Space City Park ! Speak about living the dream for us !

We met so many incredible persons during this iGEM year, we reached so many people with our education commitment and best of all, we opened so many eyes about all that could be done at the interface of Space and Synthetic Biology. This was by far our most important challenge, and we are beyond proud about how we met it.

Our only regret is to not have done more in the lab. We were clearly over-enthusiastic and over-optimistic about what could be accomplished by a team of eight students, especially in the middle of this pandemic. We would have liked to go well further, to please our advisors and sponsors with cutting edge results. But if it is not us, we now know that others will take up the challenge and we will be there to applaud their success.

In the next sections, we propose to proceed to a small auto-evaluation

Our own evaluation for medal

Bronze Medal Criteria

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Bronze #1 (Deliverables)
Bronze #2 (Attributions): https://2020.igem.org/Team:Toulouse_INSA-UPS/Attributions
Bronze #3 (Project Description): https://2020.igem.org/Team:Toulouse_INSA-UPS/Description
Bronze #4 (Contribution): https://2020.igem.org/Team:Toulouse_INSA-UPS/Contribution

Silver Medal Criteria

Silver #1 (Engineering Success): https://2020.igem.org/Team:Toulouse_INSA-UPS/Engineering
Silver #2 (Collaboration): https://2020.igem.org/Team:Toulouse_INSA-UPS/Collaborations
Silver #3 (Human Practices): https://2020.igem.org/Team:Toulouse_INSA-UPS/Human_Practices
Silver #4 (Proposed Implementation): https://2020.igem.org/Team:Toulouse_INSA-UPS/Implementation

Gold Medal Criteria

At least two (2) criteria must be met:

Gold #1 (Integrated Human Practices): https://2020.igem.org/Team:Toulouse_INSA-UPS/Human_Practices
Gold #2 (Improvement of an Existing Part):
This was planned to be done for our parts improving β-carotene synthesis. However, we ran out of time to do so.

Gold #3 (Project Modeling): https://2020.igem.org/Team:Toulouse_INSA-UPS/Model
Our main target was to prove the feasibility of the synthetic consortium coculture, but this will require further work.

Gold #5 (Partnership): https://2020.igem.org/Team:Toulouse_INSA-UPS/Partnership
Gold #6 (Science Communication): https://2020.igem.org/Team:Toulouse_INSA-UPS/Education
Gold #7 (Excellence in Another Area):
all our efforts have been made within the framework of the objectives defined by iGEM

We compete for the following special prizes

Best Model

The synthetic microbial consortium at the core of our project is complex, with many entities interacting in a dynamic way. Modeling was thus vital to ensure the system feasibility, simulate its behavior, understand its properties and optimize its design. We represented all processes using a standard graphical notation to develop a predictive, mechanistic model containing thousands of biochemical and biophysical reactions. Following an iterative approach, this model was initially fed with parameters from the literature and, once the feasibility was assessed, used to design experiments that we performed to refine key parameters. We developed original mathematical tools to evaluate the robustness of our consortium and identify parameters that control its behavior, hence driving dimensioning and rational optimization of our production system. We provide the code as an open source notebook to ensure reproducibility and reusability by any teams interested in modeling synthetic consortia behavior.

For more details, check out our Model page !

Best Integrated Human Practices

This year, we had to take our Integrated Human Practices effort to a whole new level. We had to find experts in many fields (ethics, Space, Human physiology, aerobic and anaerobic fermentation, synthetic biology, industrial processes, gas exchange, electrosynthesis, etc). We were amazed how they have been convinced by our project, up to the point of sponsoring us. They shared their contacts with us so that we were able to reach incredible people like astronauts, Space research experts, and people daily working for the International Space Station. We felt it was equally essential to carefully transcribe these efforts in our wiki so that future iGEMers could refer to it. We created synthetic presentation sheets from all our discussions and explained dynamically how they allowed the creation of the project and ensured its success. We hope you will have as much pleasure browsing our IHP as we had to complete it.

For more details, check out our IHP page !

Best Educational Engagement

We could never have guessed how far our Education and Communication efforts were going to be. Our aim from the start was to show how synthetic biology can play a major role in space exploration. We soon understood that the communication vector could not be the same depending on the public we wanted to target. So, we diversified our communication media from conferences to exhibitions, from press articles to video games, from intervention in class to webinars, always bearing in mind that everything should remain accessible, Covid19 or not. We were rewarded above our expectations. Indeed, explaining how to combine space and synthetic biology researches aroused a lot of enthusiasm and curiosity, not only from the general public and the media, but also from the scientific community. And this is only the beginning since many initiatives combining space, microbiology and synthetic biology are now flourishing in Toulouse.

For more details, check out our Educational Engagement page !

Best Supporting Entrepreneurship

Converting a technology into a business in the very specific space field was a challenge. To develop a robust entrepreneurship strategy adapted to this market, it was crucial to meet various structures and experts. Thus, a local start-up incubator and a private/public pre-industrial demonstrator of biotechnology were involved in the construction of our entrepreneurship strategy. We also met experts from the French space agency who were excited about our project and helped us finance and develop it. Taken altogether, these partnerships allowed us to structure and concretize our strategy with tools such as SWOT, risk and issues analysis, business model and plan in addition to a market study. We also put our project in perspective beyond the iGEM competition: we examined the opportunity to reuse our vitamin production system in other markets such as agrifood and already received support to continue IGEMINI with start-up incubators and hosts.

For more details, check out our Entrepreneurship page !

Best Sustainable Development Impact

Making a sustainable, responsible and good for the world project was a priority for us. At every stage, from brainstorming to project design and implementation in and out of our planet, we have continuously sought to meet the 17 goals for more sustainable development. The five that most closely match our problem were identified and we have tried to stick to them as much as possible. This forced us to work hard on the long-term positive and negative impacts of our project, on other stakeholders as well as on society, the environment and the economy. Thanks to the testimonies of many stakeholders and thanks to a consequent ethical work, we have demonstrated in a measurable and meaningful way that we are meeting these SDGs.

For more details, check out our Sustainable Development Impact page !

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