The International Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM) competition is an renowned scientific event for the whole world which aims at promoting the systematic engineering of biology by constructing basic biological systems from standard and exchangeable parts obtained from cells. Generally, there are several common difficulties for the iGEM teams which would be hard to solve sometimes due to the knowledge-gap without a well-studied biological mechanism. Some of the examples are listed as follows:

1. Hard to define standardised biological parts. Absolute measures, standardised characterisation, have to be deployed in order to reduce the associated complexity of parts comparison.

2. Not available for predictable design procedures resulting in tedious trials and errors. The teams have to optimise the the systems at all costs.

3. Hard to avoid unexpected cell-cell interactions. Biological machineries need to be insulated from the natural cell machineries as much as possible.

4. Hard to avoid variability and lift the stability of the system at the same time.

We hope to have a brief investigation on the difficulties that iGEM teams would usually encountered to see if our tristable switch would be able to eradicate the problems. Making use of the advantages of that the tristable switch proceeds, for example, higher specificity, ultra stability and being toolkit-like, hopefully, iGEM teams could further improve their projects or be provided with alternatives. Difficulties that came across during biosensing are brought into focus owing to its popularity among iGEM teams.

REFERENCES

1. Giese, B. (Ed.). (2014). Synthetic Biology: Character and Impact; Edited by B. Giese, Christian Pade, H. Wigger, Armin Von Gleich. Christian Pade, H. Wigger, Armin Von Gleich. Springer.
2. What is Intellectual Property? [PDF]. (n.d.). Switzerland: World Intellectual Property Organization.