Giant Jamboree Awards

After the Giant Jamboree, we came back home with a GOLDEN MEDAL and two special prizes! Best Hardware and best Software

Medals

Bronze

• Register for iGEM, have a great summer, and attend the Giant Jamboree, done!
• Meet all deliverables on the Requirements page: sample submission, safety forms and judging forms, completed! We hope you like our wiki, our poster and our presentation in the Jamboree
• Create a page which 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.
• Document at least one new standard BioBrick Part or Device central to your project and submit this part to the iGEM Registry: we submitted BBa_K2017004, as one of the best working linker with luciferase for our gRNA testing system.

Silver

• 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: BBa_K2017008 was submitted, our best working device of the gRNA testing system.
• 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: in our collaborations page you can check our compromise with being in contact with other teams and help in everything we could.
• Demonstrate how your team has identified, investigated and addressed one or more of these issues in the context of your project, for example relating to (but not limited to) ethics, sustainability, social justice, safety, security, and intellectual property rights:
• • We demonstrated a social engagement in compromise with scientific communication, with childs and with adults.
  • Our team analyzed the safety concerns that our project could have, specially related to viral vectors and plant editing.

Gold

• Expand on your silver medal activity by demonstrating how you have integrated the investigated issues into the design and/or execution of your project: we made an impact assessment of HYPE-IT in environment, nutrition, society and economy. Interviews with stakeholders allowed us to adjust and reconsider some of our ideas, and to obtain a global view of how could really our project improve food and nutrition.
• 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: we used the inteins of 2014 Heidelberg team, BBa_K1362400 and BBa_K1362401. We improved their characterization by testing them in plant Nicotiana benthamiana with the split-Cas9.
• 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 proved that one of the mainstays of our project, viral delivery of split-Cas9 in plants, works and edits the chosen target. The parts that constitute together the Cas9 (each part a half of the split-Cas9) are BBa_K2017000 and BBa_K2017001.

Achievements

There are three mainstays in our project:

Database and data processing software

• We gathered more than 200 entries in a database that relates plant phenotypes with genes that can be knocked-out to obtain the desired phenotype. These entries were obtained with manual curation of references and adding predicted genes using homology.
• A Data Processing Software allows any user to search in the database, to search gRNAs in genes and to add new genes and phenotypes. It is a collaborative tool that actually makes accesible CRISPR/Cas9.

Split-Cas9 delivery with viral vectors: our team successfully performed gene editing with split-Cas9 and a gRNA in vivo! You can check in our Results page.

Low cost labware and reagents, including a gRNA testing system:

• We made laboratory equipment low cost, eight tools for around 800€. You can read more in our Hardware page.
• We designed devices based on Goldenbraid assembly that make editing with CRISPR/Cas9 easy to use, similar to Lego pieces. You can check in reagents and how to perform a plant editing with HYPE-iT following our manuals.