Brainstorming process

We began our brainstorming process in late June by identifying key challenges facing the world today, such as climate change and antimicrobial resistance. We then came up with interesting aspects of biology and thought about how they might be used to solve these challenges. In order develop these ideas further, we formed smaller sub-groups tasked with researching them in more detail, before pitching them to PhDs, post-docs, and PIs from Centre for Synthetic Biology at Imperial College. We also collaborated with students from the Royal College of Art, who challenged us to be more speculative in our brainstorming and consider the real-world implications of our ideas.

The feedback we received during these sessions was very useful in refining our ideas. This generally involved deconstructing ideas into their basic components; identifying those that interested us the most, and eliminating the rest. Ideas we presented during this time included: bacterial associative learning, biosilica production, cell-free antimicrobial peptide production, genetic Turing machines, and sonogenetics. We found that some of the ideas we were most interested in relied on complex genetic circuits that would be impractical to construct in a single chassis.

Project description

As a result, we became interested in the concept of synthetic ecology as a means of spreading complex circuits and pathways across multiple microbial populations. After talking to researchers at Imperial, we realized that although interest in the area was widespread, there was a lack of standardized approaches for working with co-cultures. We would therefore like to develop a framework for working with co-cultures that can be used by other iGEM teams in the future. Furthermore, we aim to demonstrate the effectiveness of our system by applying it to a critical challenge, such as renewable chemical and material production, waste treatment, or bioremediation.