Team:Ionis Paris/Description
For our projet, we tried to focus on air pollution monitoring. We investigate the existing measurement techniques and found out that, among all the existing devices, none of them enable precise and versatile air pollution monitoring. Most of those measurement devices are placed on fixed measurement station and consequently they are unable to give precise results at a smaller scale. Atmospheric pollution quantification at small scale are more and more requested due to the ever-increasing health concerns. Learn all the details of why we believe our project can be a real breakthrough in terms of air pollution measurement. We started to work on a biosensor, a modified cell able to respond to a given signal. The goal of our cell would be to respond to the detection of a specific pollutant by emitting bioluminescence. We used the XylR protein, known to bind to molecules such as the toluene and benzene (two important pollutants), and once bound to activate the Pu promoter. Activation of this promoter would then trigger luciferase synthesis, allowing bioluminescence. Once our biosensor plasmid assembled, we used E. coli bacteria as a chassis organism. As we wanted to precisely quantify air pollution, we started working with CelloCad, a software used for plasmid optimization. Thus, we tried to improve the characterization of the two promoters of our biosensor, in order to build an optimized version of our plasmid. We developed a large number of BioBricks during our project, and tried to characterize them as best as we could, through several processes (e.g sequencing). We also worked on improving the characterization of the XylR Coding Sequence BioBrick (BBa_K1834844) through addition of a His-tag to it, and the sequence of the Gluc protein (BBa_K1732027). Please follow the link to access all informations about our: Our project aimed to solve the small-scale measurement problem and to valorize the qualities of a biosensor. We therefore developed a drone that could perform all the measurements and mappings we needed, along with an airlock tube able to sample the air while containing our biosensor bacteria. We investigated deeply what was the air pollution measurement market in our area, in order to establish a first Business Model for what we could make out of Quantifly. We also looked for informations concerning Intellectual Property, in order to know what to do if our results were good enough to make a startup out of Quantifly. We organized and attended to a lot of events during the year. Whether it is iGEMers Meetups, professional events, or even sports events that will help us raise money, our team was very active ! We loved participating to all of these events, and definitely keep some very good memories from them. As we are quite a recent team in the Paris region, we tried to meet the other iGEM Teals and collaborate with them as much as we could. We had a lot of collaborations with different teams, mainly from the Paris area, the most important one being the organization of our biggest event, the European Experience.Context
Our Core Project
Measurement
BioBricks
Hardware
Entrepreneurship
Events
Collaborations
