We believe that, to develop products or applications in a responsible way, an idea has to be positioned into the real world. To this end, the potential applications of our project were determined in an extensive Product analysis. Based on this analysis we can conclude that our biolenses are useful in many applications, such as microscopes, solar panels, cameras but also for optical fibers.

Secondly, we have done a risk analysis of our project. To be able to analyze the risks in a systematic way, we have developed a hands-on tool, which can be used by other iGEM teams as well. Based on the results of our safety analysis, 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 analyses showed that the antibiotic resistance of our microorganisms is a potential risk that has to be eliminated before the biolenses are allowed to leave the lab.

In order to specify the wants and needs of companies and the general public, we have discussed our project with several stakeholders. Stakeholders, like Nikon and Olympus highlighted, among other things, the need of uniform and spherical biolenses.

Moreover, our team appreciates being part of the diverse and international iGEM community. We believe that iGEM strongly contributes in the development of synthetic biology, and have studied how its influence, potential and practice could be expanded . Therefore, 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.

We have integrated our findings described here into our own project. More information on the implementation of human practices in our project can be found on the human practices gold page.