Team:Newcastle/Medals

Judging Criteria

As a foundational advance team we believe that we have achieved the following medal requirements:

Bronze

Medal	No.	Criteria		Detail
Bronze	1	Register for iGEM, have a great summer, and attend the Giant Jamboree.	✔	We’re a registered iGEM team and we’ve been documenting all of the fun we’ve had this summer on twitter. We’ll be at the Jamboree too. Why not come and listen to our talk? We’re presenting in the 9-10:30 slot in Room 306.
	2	Deliverables Wiki Jamboree Poster Jamboree Presentation Project Attribution Registry Part Pages Sample Submission Safety Forms Judging Form	✔	In addition to this page, there’s a wealth of other content available on our wiki. In particular this is where you can find our safety information. You can also find information about all of our parts in the parts registry.
	3	Create a page on your team wiki with clear attribution of each aspect of your project. This page must clearly attribute work done by the students and distinguish it from work done by others, including host labs, advisors, instructors, sponsors, professional website designers, artists, and commercial services.	✔	Please check out the attribution page on our wiki in which we detail the work performed by the student team members, and where we detail the support we have had, for example from Dr. Andrew Filby, head of the Flow Cytometry Core Facility at Newcastle University for helping guide us through the flow cytometry procedure for the InterLab study.
	4	Document at least one new standard BioBrick Part or Device central to your project and submit this part to the iGEM Registry (submissions must adhere to the iGEM Registry guidelines). You may also document a new application of a BioBrick part from a previous iGEM year, adding that documentation to the part main page.	✔	We have documented all of the parts, both hypothetical designs and those which were synthesized, that we have designed over the summer in the iGEM Registry. These are: Bacterial ‘Lightbulb’ A (BBa_K1895000) The wild type RBS for the rpoH gene (BBa_K1895001). The dnaK promoter from E. coli (BBa_K1895002). A correction to the htpG promoter sequence (BBa_K1895003). An OmpF porin overexpression device for use in microbial fuel cells (BBa_K1895004). An OprF porin overexpression device for use in microbial fuel cells (BBa_K1895005). Bacterial ‘Lightbulb’ B (BBa_K1895006). Biological ‘Capacitor’ (BBa_K1895995). A red light sensitive bacterial ‘light dependent resistor’ (BBa_K1895996). A blue light sensitive bacterial ‘light dependent resistor’ (BBa_K1895997). The SmtA metalothionein with additional purification and degradation tags. (BBa_K1895998). An arabinose controlled ‘variable resistor’ (BBa_K1895999). Many of our parts, especially composite ones, are constructed from parts already in the registry. One example of this is our use of the SmtA metallothionein. This has previously been used by iGEM teams for cadmium ion uptake, see for example Tokyo NoKoGen 2011. In our project however, we have experimented to see if SmtA expression can be used for Zinc (II) uptake. This new application is documented on the experience page of the original SmtA part.

Silver

Medal	No.	Criteria		Detail
Silver	1	Experimentally validate that at least one new BioBrick Part or Device of your own design and construction works as expected. Document the characterization of this part in the Main Page section of that Part’s/Device’s Registry entry. Submit this new part to the iGEM Parts Registry. This working part must be different from the part documented in bronze medal criterion #4.	✔	We were able to demonstrate that a new addition to registry, a novel porin device (BBa_K1895004), works as expected. When present and induced, this device increases the current generated by E. coli cells in a microbial fuel cell compared to wild type.
	2	Convince the judges you have helped any registered iGEM team from high school, a different track, another university, or another institution in a significant way by, for example, mentoring a new team, characterizing a part, debugging a construct, modeling/simulating their system or helping validate a software/hardware solution to a synbio problem.	✔	We’ve collaborated with several different teams over the summer. Our main collaboration however has been with the Edinburgh Undergraduate team. To enable them to illustrate the human practices aspect of their work and get feedback from the public we have incorporated their babbled system into our human practices ‘thought experiment’, a game aimed at challenging people’s perceptions of synthetic biology projects. In addition to this we also helped verify a number of their parts.
	3	iGEM projects involve important questions beyond the lab bench, for example relating to (but not limited to) ethics, sustainability, social justice, safety, security, and intellectual property rights. Demonstrate how your team has identified, investigated, and addressed one or more of these issues in the context of your project. Your activity could center around education, public engagement, public policy issues, public perception, or other activities (see the human practices hub for more information and examples of previous teams' exemplary work).	✔	Our human practices work began with a school taster day for synthetic biology and ended with us creating a computer game based ‘thought experiment’ designed to stimulate discussion around the consequences of using our technology, the interfacing of bacteria and electronics, in real world scenarios. Rather than constrain our stakeholders through the use of surveys where we question them on what we think is important, we used our game to establish a dialogue between us and our users so that together we could fully explore the implications of our work and adapt our designs appropriately.

Gold

Medal	No.	Criteria		Detail
Gold	1	Expand on your silver medal activity by demonstrating how you have integrated the investigated issues into the design and/or execution of your project.	✔	Our human practices 'thought experiment’, a game aimed at challenging people’s perceptions of synthetic biology projects has lead to a number of changes to the design of parts of our system and lead us to investigate new issues raised by our work. You can read more on our Gold Human Practices page. For example, our original microbial fuel cell used yeast cells ( Saccharomyces cerevisiae) as in the work at the University of Reading's on which our fuel cells was based. After a conversation with Dr Simon Woods, Co-Director of the Policy, Ethics and Life Sciences Research Centre, we began to understand the ethical implications of using yeast cells. The main area of concern regarding yeast was a biosecurity issue, stemming from the fact that it is freely accessible to the public. This lead us to consider the consequences of people replicating our work, perhaps at home. This lead us to explore the resources of the DIY bio community. Ultimately this had an impact on the design of our system and we chose to change from using yeast, to E. coli in our microbial to discourage the use of genetically modified yeast outside the lab. When engaging people with our human practices thought experiment one of the issues that came up repeatedly was that bacteria, such as E. coli and other microorganisms are not afforded the same status as other animals. In further discussion we established that people's attitudes to bacteria are similar to that of plants. We then highlighted that even for plants we still have some responsibilities, for example preventing deforestation and so on. It was observed that these responsibilities are different from the caring role we are supposed to have towards other animals and tend to be more environmental responsibilities. Thus, we were lead to consider the environmental impact of our work. We used this information and process to adapt our designs so that we will now supply information on how to remove the PDMS and associated recycling information alongside our kit.
	2	Improve the function OR characterization of an existing BioBrick Part or Device and enter this information in the Registry. Please see the Registry help page on how to document a contribution to an existing part. This part must NOT be from your 2016 part number range.	✔	During our project work we noticed some errors in existing registry parts like that for molecular chaperone htpG (BBa_J45504) for which we have added a correction to the registry (BBa_K1895003). The design page for the new part contains information on the error and how it was corrected. A number of our parts related to microbial fuel cells (BBa_K1895004,BBa_K1895005) and this work builds directly on that of Team Bielefeld in 2013. During their work with porins the Bielefeld team reported a problem of reduced growth of the E. coli due to metabolic stress. To overcome this issue, we have changed their promoter to a pBAD promoter which is regulated by L-arabinose. This allows replication stress to be reduced during the first part of the growth curve and for porin expression to be triggered later by the addition of L_arabinose. Cells containing our device (both the novel porin and the equivalent to Bielefeld’s device) grow normally allowing induction when the culture is established. We documented this use on the experience page for oprF in the parts registry. We have further tested the ability of the smtA gene to confer heavy metal tolerance in E. coli. smtA was previously reported to work allowing cadmium tolerance in E. coli by the Tokyo NoKoGen 2011 team. Moreover, it has been proposed to confer tolerance to other heavy metals. We chose to characterise smtA by testing against Zinc. We were unable to find any Zinc tolerance in cells containing this device, and suggest that teams working with this in future are cautious when moving beyond cadmium. We have documented this result in the parts registry. We also built on the work of Stanford BIOE44-S11 class who noted that rpoH transcript activity is reduced under excess heat shock protein production and therefore, feedback loops using rpoH should make use weaker bicistronic ribosome binding sites. We developed this further by isolating the sequence for the wild type rpoH RBS for future use and documented its availability on their part page.
	3	Demonstrate a functional proof of concept of your project. Your proof of concept must consist of a BioBrick device; a single BioBrick part cannot constitute a proof of concept. (biological materials may not be taken outside the lab).	✔	For the proof of concept of our project we used our constructs in self-contained microfluidic devices, which will allow quick and sufficient heating produced from an electrical current in order to induce our ‘light bulb’ constructs. We also wanted to be able to significantly scale down the microbial fuel cell to a size similar to the bulb component while also producing a measurable voltage. To find out more, please click here.
	4	Show your project working under real-world conditions. To achieve this criterion, you should demonstrate your whole system, or a functional proof of concept working under simulated conditions in the lab (biological materials may not be taken outside the lab).	✔	To show our project working under real-world conditions we have inserted E. coli transformed with our large porin 'battery' device BBa_K1895004 into the microfluidic fuel cell component of our 'plug and play' kit, and connected this to another microfluidic chip containing 1M NaCl by our hardware connectors. This illustrates the methodology by which the kit should be used. We showed that the electrical output from the miniature microbial fuel cell was consistent with that obtained during lab testing. To find out more, please click here.