Team:TU Delft/HP/Gold

iGEM TU Delft

Integrated Human Practices - Gold

The product analysis showed us that our biolenses are useful in many applications, such as microscopes, solar panels and optical fibers. The efficiency of solar panels can be increased by 20 to 50% when microlens arrays are used as encapsulation layer. We focused on this application to develop a business plan. Our plan was based on an extensive customer analysis. This analysis revealed that most potential customers would be interested if our microlens arrays result in a higher return on investment, are strong enough and are not more expensive than chemically-produced alternatives. We showed that our project can make it into a real business, due to the positive profitability analysis and the high demand for efficient solar panels. We believe that our business plan can be used to talk with potential investors.

Since our business plan showed that our project can make it into a real business, we decided to also test our biolenses on solar panels in a solar simulator. With these experiments we could make a first proof of principle for our business plan. Stakeholders also suggested to make round lenses, since they have advantages over the rod-shaped microlenses that we produced. This motivated us to produce spherical E. coli cells. With the gene BolA we succeeded to make the cells spherical.

When we want to use our microlenses outside the lab, safety becomes even more important than when we only use the cells inside the ML-I zones. We have used our own developed safety tool to analyse the safety risks of our own project and eventually we concluded that our project could carry multiple risks that are important to identify and minimize, before transforming it into real life applications. One of the risk analysis showed that the antibiotic resistance of our micro-organisms is a potential risk that has to be eliminated before the biolenses are allowed to leave the lab.

The risk analysis, showed that the antibiotic resistance of our micro-organisms is a potential risk that has to be eliminated before the biolenses are allowed to leave the lab. One possibility to do this, is by sterilizing the biolenses and in that way make the microorganisms inside the biolenses inviable. Therefore we have tested three methods, respectively diffusion limitation, autoclaving and UV-sterilization. Based on the experiments we have concluded that UV-sterilization is the best solution. This is the only method that is proven to fully sterilize the cells without destroying the shape of the biological lenses. With UV-sterilization we are able to take the lenses out of the lab and use them in the product of, as can been seen in our businesss plan.

We have written an analysis about iGEM with recommendations that can be used by, for example, the iGEM headquarters to optimize the potential of iGEM even more. Our complete analysis includes recommendations such as increased external collaborations between teams and the introduction of a biosafety-focused track. Based on this analysis we concluded that it would be interested to have a webpage that lists a selection of interesting tools that could be useful for the iGEM community, such as tools that can be used in the lab and educational card games. Our example page can be used as a starting point to build an extensive Toolbox iGEM page.