Medal Requirements

Bronze Requirements

1. Register the team, have a great summer, and plan to have fun at the Giant Jamboree.
• The UCLA iGEM team is registered in the collegiate division of the iGEM competition and is an undergraduate team. We had an awesome summer executing our projects, and are excited to share our results at the Giant Jamboree!


2. Meet all iGEM Deliverables
• Team Wiki-You're looking at it!
• Poster-To be presented at the Giant Jamboree!
• Presentation-To be presented at the Giant Jamboree!
• Attributions-Can be seen here
• Registry Parts Pages-The UCLA iGEM team has submitted 10 new parts to registry! To see a list of them, please visit our parts page to see the individual registry pages of each part.
• Parts Submission-All biobricks have been sent to iGEM HQ by the October 21st deadline
• Safety Forms-The UCLA iGEM team is committed to the insuring the safety of all its members, and all safety forms have been completed by their respective deadlines.
• Judging Form-Our judging form was competed and submitted on October 14, 2016.


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.
   • Our team wiki explicitly states the individual contributions of every team member, advisor, sponsor, and outside resources. Our team's attributions can be viewed here
   
   
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).
• Our team has submitted a total of 10 new parts to the Registry; a list of all parts submitted is documented here

Silver Requirements

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 the Registry entry for that Part/Device. This working part must be different from the part you documented in Bronze medal criterion #4. Submit this part to the iGEM Parts Registry.
• The biobrick BBa_K2068001, which is our PC Quad Mutant 1 part, has been validated and highly characterized. This part codes for a designed protein cage from the Yeates Lab at UCLA with inserted thrombin cleavage sites; it is designed such that in the presence of the enzyme thrombin protease, the protein cage will disassemble into its subunits. We were able to validate this via our thrombin cleavage assay and analysis via SDS-PAGE. For details on the biobrick itself, please visit its page on the registry here and for details on our methods of validation, please visit the results section of the Protein Cages project here


2. Convince the judges you have helped any registered iGEM team from a high-school, different track, another university, or 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 synthetic biology problem.
• The UCLA iGEM Team has been involved in a number of collaborations which are detailed here. In summary, we hosted the Second Annual South California iGEM in July, in which several team in the SoCal area visited UCLA and engaged in discussions about our projects, received advice and feedback on our work, and discussed the state of iGEM and our respective teams. We provided advice and mentorship to the Brazilian iGEM team on the current silk project, using our expertise and experience gained from our 2015 project. Additionally, we provided significant help to the UCSC iGEM Team with their Human Practices project by providing an extensive interview that they will present as a part of their project.


3. iGEM projects involve important questions beyond the bench, for example relating to (but not limited to) ethics, sustainability, social justice, safety, security, and intellectual property rights. We refer to these activities as Human Practices in iGEM. Demonstrate how your team has identified, investigated and addressed one or more of these issues in the context of your project.
• The UCLA iGEM Team is committed to being an advocate for the universal advancement and acceptance of synthetic biology, and we believe that progress through the field can only be achieved by informing and teaching the youth of our society. Our 2016 Human Practices project centers around education of Los Angeles youth to show them the potential of synthetic biology, and furthermore think of the implications and ethics behind scientific progress and research. Details concerning our project can be found here

Gold Requirements

1. Improve the function OR characterization of a previously existing BioBrick Part or Device (created by another team, or by your own team in in a previous year of iGEM), and enter this information in the part's page on the Registry. Please see the Registry Contribution help page for help on documenting a contribution to an existing part. This part must NOT come from your team's 2016 range of part numbers.
• We began piloting the Protein Cages project during the 2015 season and were largely unsuccessful. This year, we were able to improve upon several previously submitted biobricks, namely BBa_K1763421 , which coded for a mutant of the PC Quad protein cage (insertion of a thrombin cleavage site) that was unable to be expressed and purified. This year, we were able to modify the part and select a new insertion site for the recognition sequence from thrombin protease, thus producing BBa_K2068001 . This part is highly functional and has been extremely well characterized; we were able to express and purify this mutant cage as well as experimentally validate that it fulfills its intended purpose.


2. 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.
• We have substantial evidence that our project works as we intend it to! We have successfully expressed mutant protein cages that can be cleaved by thrombin protease, and have demonstrated this through Dynamic Light Scattering and SDS-PAGE. To see our Proof of Concept, please visit this page.