Difference between revisions of "Team:BostonU/Medal Criteria"

Bronze

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1. Register and attend: Register and Attend the 2016 iGEM Jamboree.

We registered for and attended the 2016 iGEM Jamboree. We also had a phenomenal summer.

2. Deliverables: Meet all the deliverables on the Requirements page.

We completed all of the required deliverables, including but not limited to creating this Wiki, writing a poster, developing a presentation, and sending DNA samples of our new Parts.

3. Attribution: 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 other, including host labs, advisors, instructors, sponsors, professional website designers, artists, and commercial services.

We created an attribution list to thank everyone for all of their help and services that aided in the completion of our project. We also want to give credit where credit is due. You can find our full Attribution List here.

4. Part / Contribution: Document at least one new standard BioBrick Part or Device central to your projectand submit this part to the iGEM Registry 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 and submitted BBa_K1875000 and BBa_K18750001 new standard BioBrick Composite Part that are central to our project to the iGEM Registry. You can read about them on our Parts page.

Silver

1. Validated Part / Validated Contribution: Experimentally validate that at least one new BioBrick Part of Device of your own design and construction works as expected. Document this 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 have validated that our new BioBrick Composite Part, BBa_K18750002- BBa_K18750007, different from Bronze BBa_K1875000 and BBa_K18750001, works as expected. See our Proof of Concept and Results page or the (Part Registry entry) page to see how. See our Proof of Concept and Results or the Part Registry entry page to see how.

2. Collaboration: 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 collaborated with both the WPI and BostonU Hardware iGEM teams over the course of this project. WPI visited our lab to assay their samples using flow cytometry, a method they don't have access to at their laboratory. Specifically they were testing….(Insert what they were specifically testing here) Together we validated that the parts functioned as predicted. We also created a blog about intellectual property in synthetic biology with the BostonU Hardware team. Check out all of our Collaborations with iGEM teams here.

3. Human Practices: 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 addresed 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.

We completed two distinct Human Practices projects. The project for our Silver Medal was a collaboration with our fellow Boston U team. We created a blog called “Who Owns What: A mildly entertaining look into intellectual property in synthetic biology.” The Foundational Advance team went to the 3rd Annual Mammalian Synthetic Biology Workshop which concluded with a panel about intellectual property (IP). This module had perhaps twenty percent of the attendance as the other modules of the Workshop. When discussing IP with their mentors, they found that there was little knowledge among many scientists surrounding IP, simply due to lack of interest and/or accessibility. This led us to create a light hearted blog outline the need to knows about IP and how it impacts iGEMmers in our work day to day.You can read about our blog here.

Gold

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

Inspired by a forum held after the Museum of Science’s Building with Biology event, we decided to create ethical forums for high school students that focused on foundational advancements in synthetic biology, ranging from Martian Colonization to Genetically Engineering the Mosquito. These forums provided background about the topic to be discussed, several plans of action, considerations to keep in mind when drawing to a conclusion, and questions to aid students to come to a solution. We contacted several high schools and had the pleasure of conducting them for a high school class, a summer high school STEM program, and a college course. We are also planning to host a mini Jamboree for high school students that will include one of our forums that is set to take place in February 2017. You can read about our visits and our forums here.

2. Improve a previous part or project: Improve the function OR characerization of an existing BioBrick Part or Device and enter this information in the Registry. The part must NOT be from your 2016 part number range.

Our guide operators contain a minimal CMV promoter, we thought that we it would be best to improve the characterization of a full CMV that has already been submitted to the iGEM BioBrick Registry (BBa_I712004). We PCRed around the CMV and gel extracted it. We then ligated and it into one of our operator-promoter backbones containing GFP. We then transformed E. coli and transfected the plasmids into HEK 293FT cells. We tested how single activated operators, as well as a triple multimerized operator, both containing a minimal CMV, compared to the BioBrick Registry’s CMV through flow cytometry. We found that while the single operator expressed less than the Registry’s CMV, our triple multimerized operators had greater fluorescence expression than the Registry’s CMV. You can view our data on our Parts page.

3. Proof of Concept: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.

When we set out to develop Gemini, we had three distinct goals: develop a collection of mutually orthogonal “digital” parts, developing a collection of “analog” parts, and integrating the parts from the library into genetic circuit context. In the initial stages of our project, we screened over one thousand guides against hg19 using MIT’s CRISPR optimization tool. From there we selected 20 guides for synthesis and screened them in iRFP for activation ability. We then selected four guides and tested their mutual orthogonality. Finally, we cloned the guides into three additional genes of interest (GFP, BFP, mRuby). The results for this can be found on (INSERT Appropriate Link). We then moved to expand our library into analog expression by multimerizing the binding sites (to increase expression) and mutating the binding sites (to decrease expression). The results of these screens can be found on (Insert Appropriate Link). It can be seen that these techniques to alter the expression levels of our operators. Finally, we integrated our parts into increasingly complex genetic circuits which can be found out (insert link here). The results prove that our system can be used to in gene logic and can handle increasingly complex computation. See our Project Tab to see the progression of our work, or go to the Proof of Concept to find an abridge collection of results.