Team:WLC-Milwaukee/Judging

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Achievements

Bronze

Our team has satisfied the following departments:

Registered for iGEM, had a great summer, and attended the Giant Jamboree.

Meet all deliverables on the Requirements page.

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.

Documented at least one new standard BioBrick Part or Device central to our project and submitted it to the iGEM Registry. These are the three parts that we have created:

- Bba_K1900000/Klebsiella tolC

- Bba_K1900001/Serratia tolC

- Bba_K1900002/E. coli tolC

Silver

In addition to the Bronze Medal requirements, our team has also satisfied these following departments:

Experimentally validated these new BioBrick Part or Device of our own design and construction works as expected. We designed Bba_K1900000/Klebsiella tolC, Bba_K1900001/Serratia tolC, Bba_K1900002/E. coli tolC as our new BioBrick parts. We have used a Western blot to demonstrate that the TolC protein is being expressed from these genes. Based on antibiotic sensitivity experiments, we have demonstrated that these TolC proteins are also functional in the E. coli cell. We documented the characterization of each part in the Main Page section of the Registry entry for that Part/Device.

Convince the judges that you have helped any registered iGEM team from high school, a different track, another university, or another institution in a significant way. We collaborated with various teams involving surveys and advice for the problems that they came across on their projects.

iGEM projects involved important questions beyond the bench, for example relating 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.

- Surveys of home school teachers and our summer campers.

- Outreach through our STEM Program.

- Posters sent out to Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod (WELS) churches.

There is a high importance for our team to educate the WELS churches and high schools. Since we attend a school with a Christian background, we have an obligation to ensure that the ethics of our project are based in our Christian beliefs. By informing various WELS organizations on the details of our project, we are showing many people that there is good in what we are trying to accomplish. There can be a bad stigma when it comes to science and religion, and we are trying to break this barrier down so we can happily coincide with each other. We want to show high school students who want to pursue a degree in research that it does not have to go against their religious beliefs.

Gold

In addition to the Bronze and Silver Medal requirements, our team also achieved these following goals:

Expand on your silver medal activity by demonstrating how you have integrated the investigated issues into the design and/or execution of your project.

- Bioengineering Summer Camp

- Biotech Info Night

To integrate our project into our human practices, we used the previous events to educate many students on the topic of coral disappearance due to infection by Serratia marcescens. By informing the students on this subject, we can spread the importance of our research and lab work. It was of importance that we explain to our listeners that our project is attempting to make a difference. During the summer camp, the students were give a tour of various coral reef tanks as well as hearing a lecture on the importance and disappearance of the coral reefs. At Biotech Info Night, Elise, Harrison, and Jack discussed the effect of S. marcescens on Elkhorn coral that we have been researching in our project.

Improve the function OR characterization of a previously existing BioBrick Part or Device (created by another team, or by your own team in a previous year of iGEM).

Our 2014 iGEM team generated a BioBrick K1406000 that contained an arabinose-inducible promoter and ribosomal binding site (RBS). While the sequence was correct, we were unable to demonstrate that the promoter and RBS were functional. This year’s team has taken that part and added TolC genes from three new bacterial species, such as Serratia marcescens tolC, Klebsiella tolC, and E. coli tolC, and the arabinose promoter did express these tolC genes.