Team:Manchester
Welcome to Manchester iGEM 2016!
Welcome to the University of Manchester’s iGEM 2016 Wiki page! We are a team of 10 undergraduate students all studying at the The University of Manchester and Manchester Metropolitan University. We are based in the Manchester Institute of Biotechnology under the supervision of Professor Rainer Breitling and Professor Eriko Takano.
Welcome to the University of Manchester’s iGEM 2016 Wiki page! We are a team of 10 undergraduate students all studying at the The University of Manchester and Manchester Metropolitan University. We are based in the Manchester Institute of Biotechnology under the supervision of Professor Rainer Breitling and Professor Eriko Takano.
Project Description
Self-awareness of alcohol consumption and intoxication levels is surprisingly difficult to achieve. Our alcohol awareness tool, AlcoPatch, provides a cheap , bio-based, sustainable and robust solution to help increasing self-awareness. The AlcoPatch would provide users with a visible colour signal indicating their blood alcohol concentration in real time. Throughout the project, we have worked closely with the police, health care providers, charities and potential users to design a product that would meet the real needs of communities around the world. Having a rapid and reliable indicator to show visually when one has had enough could help reduce the undesired consequences of being too drunk. This helps people who do not want to get drunk, but would also have positive knock-on effects to the people around them, from reducing public disturbance to avoiding drink-driving.
Self-awareness of alcohol consumption and intoxication levels can be difficult for anyone to master. Through the exploration of trying to find a niche within our society that our project could be beneficial to, our project’s targeted audience has changed dramatically since the initial idea of the AlcoPatch. We have found that our AlcoPatch would have many applications to the people within our society whose aim is to not actually get drunk! Our patch would provide these people with a visible colour change according to their blood alcohol concentration thus giving them the ability to monitor their personal intoxication levels. Having an indicator to show how intoxicated a person is could help reduce the undesired consequences of being too drunk, the knock-on effects of these to the public services, drink-driving, as well as the prevention of serving alcohol to people who are over the limit and much more.
Science Behind AlcoPatch
It is known that the ethanol concentration in sweat is linearly related to the blood alcohol concentration [3]. Based on this, we aim to develop an ethanol biosensor by using synthetic biology, based on two separate potential methods to measure intoxication levels. The first mechanism involves the use of alcohol oxidase (AOx) in a cell-free system to oxidise ethanol to acetaldehyde that produces hydrogen peroxide (H2O2) as a by-product. H2O2 is used as an oxidising agent by horseradish peroxidase (HRP) to convert ABTS (2,2'-azino-bis(3-ethylbenzothiazoline-6-sulphonic acid)) to produce a gradient of the colour green. The second mechanism involves activation of the ethanol-sensitive transcription factor alcR in engineered Escherichia coli (E. coli) . The activated transcription factor then activates the alcA promoter leading to the expression of chromoproteins.
It is known that the ethanol concentration in sweat is linearly related to the blood alcohol concentration. Based on this, we aim to develop an ethanol biosensor by using synthetic biology with two separate methods to measure intoxication levels. The first mechanism involves the usage of alcohol oxidase (AOx) in a cell-free system to oxidise ethanol to acetaldehyde that produces hydrogen peroxide (H2O2) as a by-product. H2O2 is used as an oxidising agent by horseradish peroxidase (HRP) to convert ABTS (2,2'-azino-bis(3-ethylbenzothiazoline-6-sulphonic acid)) to produce a colour change. The second mechanism involves activation of ethanol sensitive alcR in engineered Escherichia Coli (E.Coli). The activated transcription factor then activates the promoter alcA leading to the expression of chromoprotein.
Judging Criteria
- See you at the Giant Jamboree!
- Created a Team Wiki. Welcome, you are currently on it!
- Massive thank you to every individual who has contributed towards our project.
- Click to find out more about our safety check-in, lab, project, final safety and judging form.
- Check out one of our new parts, BBa_K2092000, which has been submitted to the iGEM Registry.
- Hope to see all of you at our poster and project presentation at the Giant Jamboree 2016!
- Experimentally validated and showed success on our key BioBricks: BBa_K2092003, BBa_K2092004, BBa_K2092008 and BBa_K2092009.
- Without the collaboration with other iGEM teams, our project would not have been successful. Thank you!
- Reached out to various stakeholders, charities, public services and many others to make sure our device addresses real-world needs in a responsible and efficient way.
- Integrated the investigated issues into the design of your project by modelling the cost analysis of the AlcoPatch and finding suitable alternatives for risk-posing substances used in this project.
- Improved an existing BioBrick by adding two missing restriction sites – XbaI and SpeI making assembly process easier.
- Characterised previously existing BioBricks BBa_K1033930 and BBa_K1033925.
- Demonstrated a functional proof of concept of our project.
2016 iGEM Giant Jamboree Results
Our team attended the Boston iGEM Jamboree and we won a Gold Medal for our outstanding efforts, furthermore, we were presented with the prestigious Best Model award as well as being nominated for the Best Education & Public Engagement.
Our team attended the Boston iGEM Jamboree and we won a Gold Medal for our outstanding efforts, furthermore, we were presented with the prestigious Best Model award as well as being nominated for the Best Education & Public Engagement.
References
- Global status report on alcohol and health. 2014 edition. Geneva: World Health Organization; 2014. Available at: http://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/10665/112736/1/9789240692763_eng.pdf [Accessed 14 October 2016]
- Alcohol concern, (2016). Alcohol statistics. [online]. Available at: http://www.alcoholconcern.org.uk/alcohol-statistics [Accessed 14 October 2016]
- Buono, M.J. (1999). ‘Sweat ethanol concentrations are highly correlated with co-existing blood values in humans’, Experimental Physiology , 84, 401-404.
