Unit 7: Case Studies

UCCKE 2017 (Our own case for new High School teams)

We will use the timeline of team Hong_Kong_UCCKE in iGEM 2017 as a demonstration of a typical run down of an iGEM project.

Paris Bettencourt 2016

Introduction

The paris Paris Bettencourt 2016 team was awarded the Best Integrated Human Practices and was Nominated for Best Applied Design in the overgrad division. Although they were an overgrad team, there is still a lot that we can learn from, particularly their public engagement/human practice section and the design of their projects. Since the coverage of their project is so broad, the details of each of the 6 sub-projects will not be discussed but the overview of the whole project will be given. For more details of their team, please visit their wiki at http://2016.igem.org/Team:Paris_Bettencourt

Overview

PERC, or Tetrachloroethylene, is very commonly used in the dry cleaning industry as it is an excellent organic solvent and is able to remove stains from all types of fabrics. It is quite effective and quite cheap, which means that most dry cleaners throughout the globe use it daily. However, recent study suggests PERC as possible carcinogens to human and is toxic to the environment. Therefore, the French government is complete banning of PERC from dry cleaning establishments situated close to residential areas by 2022. It is necessary for these dry-cleaning washer to find alternative detergent to remove stains. As one of the toughest stain to remove is Red wine stain (according to their human practice), they aim to remove red wine stain without using PERC by a synthetic biology approach.

The key focus of their project was to identify and synthesise enzymes to digest the pigment of red wine stain, Anthocyanin. To do so, they screened soil sample from vineyards and identifies multiple microbes capable of digesting Anthocyanin enzymatically, and express the enzymes heterologously in E.coli. To further enhance the enzymes efficiency, effort was made in discovering fabric binding domain and using a short peptide (4 AA residue) to link up the fabric binding domain to the enzyme. To test their design, they developed an assay to test its efficiency. To model their results of various assays, they build multiple computational models with various assumption to further optimize the enzymatic activity and the binding domains efficiency. A side project was also done to discover other enzymatic methods to create washed jeans with indigo (dye that makes the jeans blue) degrading enzymes.

Human Practice

(link:http://2016.igem.org/Team:Paris_Bettencourt/About_Perc )

The Paris Bettencourt 2016 is awarded the Best Integrated Human Practices in Overgrad.

The have carried out a literature review about possible risks of using PERC and alternative dry cleaners, but conclude that all current approaches have respective drawbacks. This gives them a solid reason and background story to why choose this as their topic.

To allow them to fully understands the real life experience of handling PERC and dry cleaning, they have done an extensive survey by interviewing in person with all 250 plus dry cleaners in Paris. This survey allows them to have a better idea of dry cleaning industry and assess the prevalence in the use of PERC.

This extensive study allows the team to develop a new-gen and environmentally friendly dry cleaning product specialising in removing red wine stain that satisfies the need of dry cleaners in Paris. This is a great example of how an iGEM team can connect with its community by actually engaging with the public and solving their problems. Even though the concept of their project is relatively simple and straightforward, it shows how a relatively simple idea with such details and thoughtfulness can still receive high praise from the judges. Ultimately, iGEM is about solving realistic problems via synthetic biology approaches, so it would be best to have a real world implications for your iGEM project too. Moreover, the project should be ethically sound and safe, or else it would only cause more public concern and it would be much harder to engage with the public this way.

Project design

(link:http://2016.igem.org/Team:Paris_Bettencourt/Description)

The core idea of their project is to remove red wine stain via synthetic enzymes. However, to maximize its effectiveness, a lot of effort is put into optimizing their products performance and modelling of their results. This includes creating synthetic fabric binding domain and building computational model to predict and better understand the effect of the enzyme-stain-fabric system.

They also manage to build a prototype to implement their design and send some samples for the local dry cleaners to test it out. To optimize their enzymatic product effect, they even developed a specialised working station prototype that will facilitate the action of the enzymatic product that can store the product at a low temperature and an incubator to allow the enzymes to work at its optimum temperature. There product shows the thoughtfulness of the team by considering both the storage and operational requirements, which was also highly praised by the judges.

HSiTAIWAN 2016

Introduction

The HSiTAIWAN is the Grand Prize winner and Best Applied Design winner of the 2016 iGEM for the high school track, as well as nominated for best Presentation, best Integrated Human Practices. As a highschool team, they have delivered an extremely impressive project that is practical and pragmatic. We would be focusing on the implementation (product). For more details of their team, please visit their wiki at http://2016.igem.org/Team:HSiTAIWAN

Overview

The HSiTAIWAN 2016 focussed on biosensing of toxins in Chinese medicine and aims to build an easily accessible toxicity detector for the general public. As chinese medicine is extremely popular in Taiwan, there are safety concerns of chinese medicine contaminated with heavy metals and mycotoxins. However, current testing methods are very expensive and requires advanced instruments, thus it is less accessible. The toxin that they wish to detect is aflatoxin (a toxin produced by some molds), lead ions, copper ions and arsenic ions, as they are regarded as toxins by the Taiwanese government. Novel genetic circuits and other parts were created and GFP is used as the reporter gene to indicate the presence of such toxins above a certain level. Further effort was made to design a product that is economical and safe to handle that can indicate the presence of such toxins. Assays test are also developed to characterized and test their constructs.

Device

(link:http://2016.igem.org/Team:HSiTAIWAN/Product)

Their team was awarded with the Best Applied Design, which shows that their team have complete a workable prototype.

The product of the their team is a toxin detector for chinese medicine using living Biosensing E.coli with GFP as reporter. There product also features a three-step biosafety measure to ensure the the E.coli will be killed after the test and prevent leakage. This device is also cheaper and easier to use than any other methods for testing that are present now, which mainly relies on analytical chemistry methods. Showing that using synthetic biology approaches is a better method than other conventional approaches is an important idea of iGEM. This concept is derived from the ultimate goal of iGEM is to make real products that can help solve the public population’s problems, and that the product can be competitive in the market. The emphasis on safety of their project is also highly appreciated as the public would be very concerned about handling GMed bacteria by normal people.

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