Our Motivation

Electronic engineering has given us the television and the mobile phone, while genetic engineering has afforded us mass-scale antimalarial drugs, biofuels and a plethora of biosensors.

More than a decade ago, Tom Knight and colleagues at MIT envisioned using 'BioBricks' to standardise synthetic biological parts. Here at Newcastle, we want to return to iGEM's humble origins and come full circle. We are currently working on replacing traditional electronic components with biological alternatives. Through the creation of new compatible bacterial components, we aim to unite biological and electrical components to create electro-biological circuitry within a breadboard chassis.

The circuit will allow synthetic biologists to combine bacterial and electronic components to create electro-biological circuits, offering an exciting new fusion of synthetic biology, electronic engineering, and computer science. The ultimate goal of the Culture Shock project is to achieve consistent outputs for our biological parts.

Our Achievements

As a team, we have achieved a lot over the course of our relatively short (but great!) summer as part of iGEM. We have designed, characterised, and documented new parts in the iGEM Registry of Standard Biological Parts. Not content with just working on our our project, we have also made lots of new friends through collaboration with a number of teams and our attendance in UK and European meets.

As well as getting to know fellow iGEM-ers, we have run school taster days to get 16 & 17-year-olds interested in synthetic biology. We also met with researchers in the field to explore the ethical impact of our work. Acting upon these meetings, we have written software to explore different aspects of our project, addressing topics such as 'how it would biological parts integrate into an electric circuit', and 'how to use thought experiment to explore the ethics of our work'. If you thought we’d just stick to software you’d be wrong, for our project we also built a prototype 'plug n play' breadboard kit to articulate how we imagine biological and electronic components uniting in the real world.

And that’s not all, over the summer we have also submitted corrections to sequences in the registry and built on the work of past iGEM teams like Tokyo-NoKoGen 2011's use of metallothioneins, and 2013 Bielefeld's use of porins in microbial fuel cells. Last but not least, we participated in the 2016 InterLab study, completing both the plate reader and flow cytometry data collection tasks.

You can find much more information, on our achievements and how they relate to the iGEM medal requirements on our medal requirements page.

What Next?

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