Team:BITSPilani-Goa India
Tonnes of sugar are lost every year as post-harvest losses. We're here to change that.
Sugarcane is one of India’s most important crops. It is cultivated on 5 million hectares of land, making India the second-largest producer of the crop which contributes to 6% of the national GDP and forms the livelihood for 20 million people across the country.
This industry is in peril, however. Post-harvest sucrose deterioration is responsible for losses worth millions of rupees. Following its harvest, enzymatic activity reduces sugar recovery rates by upto 10%!
Our solution mitigates this problem.
We’re SugarGain, and we’re making the world a sweeter place, quite literally!
Design caption goes here.
We aim to target invertase present in the sugarcane stem - the enzyme responsible for cleaving sucrose into its constituents. Our project is structured into three major modules: a fructose regulated anti-invertase construct, an atmospherically-regulated kill switch, and a novel polymer inoculant.
Click here to know more about our project design.
Safety caption goes here.
Biosafety is a cruicial aspect of our project, especially so when our chassis is so closely involved with food products.
Throughout our project design we have tried to be cognizant about identifying strategies for robust biosafety. To ensure the highest possible levels of safety, we have developed a three-tier failsafe meachanism after taking into consideration the various use cases of our chassis.
Click here to read more our biosafety approach.
Human-centered design.
Human Practices is essential for responsible project design. Our approach to human practices consisted of multiple iterations which allowed us to effectively interview industry experts, researchers and users. Throughout our project, we identified and spoke to various diverse stakeholders relevant to our project.
We have tried our best to inculcate this feedback at every stage of design of our project. Click here to know more about our Human Practices approach!
Collaborating for the win.
Collaborations form the backbone of inclusive research. We had the opportunity to meet various teams from across the world. They were instrumental in validating our approach, mathematical models and even helped us in reaching out to industry experts.
Through our Humans of iGEM initiative we had the chance to meaningfully interact with teams despite these extraordinary circumstances.
Click here to know more about our collaborations!
Contribution Headline
As a team participating in iGEM for the first time, we were absolutely thrilled by the community spirit that iGEM fosters. It was amazing to see how helpful everyone was, and over the years, participating teams had developed into a tightly-knit community, working together on shared goals and aspirations, and having lots of fun along the way!
To contribute to this amazing community, we developed three softwares: iGEM WikiSync: A continuous deployment tool for iGEM wikis; iGEM WikiSync Github Action: A Github Actions plugin that allows Github repositories to deploy wikis to iGEM servers; and the iGEM Wiki Starter Pack: The easiest way to build iGEM Wikis. Click here to know more about these!