Template:UNILausanne/Medals
Medals & Awards
On this page, we have listed the different achievements of our project that fit the medals and awards criteria.
Bronze:
Competition Deliverables ✓
- Wiki ✓
- Poster: our poster will be available by 10 Nov 2020
- Presentation Video: our video will be available by 30 Oct 2020
- Project Promotion Video ✓
- Judging Form ✓
Attributions ✓
We stated the role of each team member as well as credited everyone who has helped us along the way.
Project Description ✓
We have described what motivated us to choose this project and why it is important.
Contribution ✓
For our contribution, we submitted the following parts:
Silver ✓
Engineering Success ✓
To prove our success in applying the engineering design cycle, we have made the following parts:
Collaborations ✓
- Science Blog with Chalmers-Gothenburg iGEM team : The Transcriptome
- Swiss iGEM Meetup
- Business Plan: UZurich iGEM Team gave us feedback
- MSP Journal Initiative: scientific paper that is to be featured on their online journal
- Heidelberg Science Slam: organized by the iGEM team of Heidelberg
- Francophone Video collaboration: video introducing a large number of teams in the European French-speaking region
- Imperial College London: help with the modelling
- Biosafety feedback: OhioState iGEM team gave us advice on how to design and model our kill switch
Human Practices ✓
Proposed Implementation ✓
We have created a business plan to discuss of how our final product of our project would look like and what we need to put it in the market. We also looked into some encapsulation designs to see how our product could be stored.
Gold ✓
Integrated Human Practices ✓
We reflected on the public's concerns about biosafety and GMO containment (see GMO survey part) with the addition of a kill switch design and received feedback from experts on how to improve it.
We also dived into the historical problem of gender disparities in scientific data, and decided to try to eliminate this bias in our project by modelling how to personalize our system to each gender. We also conducted interviews on the topic of gender equality to try to understand why this problem still exists today.
Improvement of an Existing Part ✓
- BBa_K3482038 (improvement of BBa_K2500001 in secretion)
Project Modelling ✓
We have modelled the repressilator and made an Individual-Based Model to predict how long our treatment would be stable in an unstable environment like the body.
Proof of Concept ✓
We demonstrated that azurin is produced and secreted. Moreover, we characterized the effect of anti-cancer drugs on colorectal cancerous cells.
Science Communication & Education ✓
- Science Blog with Chalmers-Gothenburg: The Transcriptome
- Heidelberg Science Slam: organised by the iGEM team of Heidelberg
- GMO Survey: to hear different opinions on agricultural and medical GMO’s
- Swiss Meetup: we introduced our product to the other Swiss teams.
Special Prizes
Best Education
Most scientific papers and science communication media are available only in English and it can be a problem for people who are not fluent in this language. In collaboration with the Chalmers-Gothenburg iGEM team team, we made a multilingual science communication blog. We posted a new text each week, writing about synthetic biology, genetic circuits, cancer or the immune system, aiming to provide articles for people without a scientific background. Our other goal was to tackle subjects beyond the “scientific bench”, so we wrote about outstanding women in science or still controversial topics like GMOs, whose use is particularly common in synthetic biology. We published three guest posts from other iGEM teams and our texts are available in eight languages (English, French, Swedish, Spanish, Japanese, Brazilian-Portugese, Italian and Polish). Our readers have a possibility to comment on and engage in a discussion about each text!
Inclusion Award
Even though we are competing as a Swiss team, a lot of the team members are not of Swiss origin. So, to reflect this existing diversity in our work as well, we created two sub-projects. First off, we collaborated with Chalmers-Gothenburg iGEM team to create The Transcriptome, a science blog translated to eight languages to try to reach the broadest audience possible. We wanted to make scientific information available to people in their native language, to make the reading experience as unchallenging as possible.
We also conducted some interviews with people in different stages of their career (master students, post-docs, professors) in the STEM field to raise awareness on the lack of women in the scientific field. We wanted to try and get some insight in their experiences in their career paths, as well as getting their opinion on changes that have already been implemented trying to solve this issue.
Best Integrated Human Practices
We sent out a survey on biosafety and GMO containment. The public's concerns expressed therein, as well as our collaboration with the OhioState iGEM Team, culminated in the addition of a kill switch to our project. Finally, we received feedback from experts on how to improve this, and we determined what would be the legal biosafety requirements for our project to be able to be released on the market.
We also dived into the historical problem of gender disparities in scientific data, and decided to eliminate this bias in our project by modelling how to adapt our system to the circadian cycle of each gender. We also conducted interviews on the topic of gender equality to try to understand why this problem still exists today.
Best Model
In a project like ours, where the actual application is beyond its scope (due to clinical trials and GMO legislation), models are essential to gain insights in the system and its final application. We were concerned about how long bacteria would oscillate synchronously in a gut-like environment. To assess this, we initially explored existing deterministic models of the repressilator, to later create our own discrete individual-based model. Cells were simplified to a list of proteins (LacI, TetR, CI) plus a counter of undergone divisions, and we set the rules to determine how they change their protein amounts, divide or die in two different settings (one or two dimensions). We validated the model with previous simulations and experimental findings and were able to show how the variability in cell division decouples the oscillations of individual cells. We additionally built a deterministic model to ease the design of a kill switch.
Best Supporting Entrepreneurship
We created a business plan analysis to assess if our project B.O.T could become a commercial therapy available on the market. To this end, we did a stakeholder analysis (to appraise who would be the people of interest), intellectual property analysis (how we could protect our ideas), a market analysis (to find the niche where our product could be sold, whilst evaluating who our competitors would be), marketing strategy analysis (how to convince people to be on board with our project), and finally we evaluated expert advice from various people in the biotechnology industry to see if our product would be able to compete with available treatments, and what could be improved. We also began to estimate the potential selling costs and which design improvements would be necessary, as well as how long it would take for our product to be approved to be on the market.
Best Measurement
For the biosafety component of our project, we designed and tested a kill switch system using two well-known toxin-antitoxin systems (ccdb/ccda and colicin E2/IM2). We tested the effect of differential expression of toxin and antitoxin by using two orthogonally inducible promoters. We measured growth curves to determine the size effect and duration of the growth inhibition for a gradient of the inducers’ concentrations spanning several orders of magnitude. With this extensive characterization, we showed which expression levels of toxin and antitoxin are required to obtain desired growth outcomes, and thereby laid the foundations for the implementation of a kill switch based-solution for the iGEM community.
Part Awards
Best New Composite Part
We submitted the following part:
Best Part Collection
Our part collection includes four parts which are easing the purification and identification of the azurin protein. Through the insertion of either the pelB-5D or NSP4 secretion tag, one can make the export through the periplasm or cell wall of gram-negative bacteria possible. In addition, 3XFLAG, a commonly used epitope tag, was added to enable researchers to perform a wide array of antibody associated experiments, such as immunoblotting (Western blot) or immunodetection (ELISA). We believe that by using this well-characterized part collection, future iGEM teams who wish to work with azurin will have increased chances of success.
