Team:Bielefeld-CeBiTec/Integrated Practices
Integrated Human Practices
When starting with iGEM students have only less experienced the life as a researcher. All they know is how to work after a predetermined plan. With iGEM we learn to assume responsibility and to work on our own without having a supervisor. To not be thrown into the deep the iGEM headquarter provide some guidelines for the iGEM teams. The almost most important and useful guideline is integrated human practice. With working on integrated human practice our team learned how to take responsibility for their research and to think about what effects it can have for others and the environment.
CeBiTec Symposium "Microbial Genomics and Metagenomics in Human Health and Disease"
From July 4th to 6th we had the chance to present our project to scientific audience from all over Germany and Europe at the 11th CeBiTec symposium. The conference with the topic "Microbial Genomics and Metagenomics in Human Health and Disease" occurs at the "Center of Interdisciplinary Research" of Bielefeld University. Among many interesting lectures and workshops, there was a poster session and much time for the scientific exchange. We were proud to have the opportunity to show our newly designed poster (figure 1) to many interested visitors. Participating experts from the field of biology and medicine provided us with a lot of useful tips and their opinions about our project.
As we got several understand problems with non-researchers and researchers, we started to write a dictionary. Thus we had to think about how to explain technical terms in understanding words. Writing the dictionary helped us to deal with difficult words. Furthermore we hope that our dictionary will help other iGEM teams, when they are need to explain their project easily.
With writing our dictionary our journey for an easier understandable project wasn’t over. We also started “Directed Evolution of Educational Outreach”, where we went to several schools presenting our project and iteratively improve our project explanation. Also we taught some pupils about synthetic biology and learned what difficulties in understanding basic research experiments have non-researchers to overcome with. Our last hurdle were the Postcard action and the NRW day. During the postcard action we had to find a way to explain synthetic biology to everyone and that on a 150 cm2 tiny piece of paper. On the NRW day we presented our project to the public and tried to explain synthetic biology. During that day we distributed our postcards.
Expert Contacts
To make our mutagenesis system useful for the public, we contacted several experts. Some experts are working in the field of diagnostics and some devote with in vivo mutagenesis.
Searching for a target
Searching for an application field was a difficult task do deal with. Our system is designed for a wide field. But since we need an issue to focus to and optimizing our system to, we asked several experts for their opinion and a review to our mutagenesis system.
Prof Dr. Med. Ulrike Protzer, professor at the technical university in Munich, director of the institute of virology and currently working at the Helmholtz center (German center for environmental health), said, that she could image an application in the virology. We could develop a diagnostic assay, since the production of our Evobodies in E. coli would be cheap. Thus, we could provide a cheap diagnostic for third world countries like Africa.
Something equally said Prof. Dr. Ralf Bartenschlager, professor at the university of Heidelberg and member of the department of infectious diseases, who mentioned emerging viruses. Emerging viruses are viruses that occur suddenly. Most of them are unknown or difficult to find. They can spread in no time. A good example for that are the Zika virus, the MERS-Corona virus, the Ebola virus or newly influenza viruses. As a basic researcher he thinks that our method can perfectly complement modern –omics methods by providing an antibody.
Further topics that are mentioned by other experts can be seen in the following figure 3:
Prof Dr. Med. Ulrike Protzer, professor at the technical university in Munich, director of the institute of virology and currently working at the Helmholtz center (German center for environmental health), said, that she could image an application in the virology. We could develop a diagnostic assay, since the production of our Evobodies in E. coli would be cheap. Thus, we could provide a cheap diagnostic for third world countries like Africa.
Something equally said Prof. Dr. Ralf Bartenschlager, professor at the university of Heidelberg and member of the department of infectious diseases, who mentioned emerging viruses. Emerging viruses are viruses that occur suddenly. Most of them are unknown or difficult to find. They can spread in no time. A good example for that are the Zika virus, the MERS-Corona virus, the Ebola virus or newly influenza viruses. As a basic researcher he thinks that our method can perfectly complement modern –omics methods by providing an antibody.
Further topics that are mentioned by other experts can be seen in the following figure 3:
Firstly, we thought of using our system as a diagnostic tool, but we quickly changed to a developing tool. Since the most experts said that viruses and thus newly occurring diseases are a good target for our mutagenesis system (e.g. Prof. Dr. med. Jonas Schmidt-Chanasit, Dr. med. Friedemann Tewald, Prof. Dr. med. Lars Dölken), we optimized our system accordingly. As a target we choose Flaviviruses and especially Zika, since Zika it is the most mentioned answer. Also it is an acute issue that must be dealt with. Therefore we ordered the coating protein E protein of Zika to test our system with. We also want to test our library to different other targets and got some binder.
To be able to use the mutagenesis system as a detection system we wanted to provide our reporter gen with a fluorescent dye. Thus we are able to detect a cell that produce a suitable Evobody. Also we can measure the strength of the fluorescence und thus conclude to the affinity of our target and Evobody.
Because some experts told us that we must consider the restricted protein folding in E. coli, thereby to look out for disulfide bridges we decided to use monobodies and nanobodies in our library. Proteins with disulfide bonds mostly can not be fold correctly in E. coli and therefore does not work with our bacterial two-hybrid system. Additionally, to begin with we plan to use our mutagenesis system as an antibody refinery like Prof. Dr. Bartenschlager advocates. Thus, we are producing antibody mimetics and provide their sequence to other researchers.
To be able to use the mutagenesis system as a detection system we wanted to provide our reporter gen with a fluorescent dye. Thus we are able to detect a cell that produce a suitable Evobody. Also we can measure the strength of the fluorescence und thus conclude to the affinity of our target and Evobody.
Because some experts told us that we must consider the restricted protein folding in E. coli, thereby to look out for disulfide bridges we decided to use monobodies and nanobodies in our library. Proteins with disulfide bonds mostly can not be fold correctly in E. coli and therefore does not work with our bacterial two-hybrid system. Additionally, to begin with we plan to use our mutagenesis system as an antibody refinery like Prof. Dr. Bartenschlager advocates. Thus, we are producing antibody mimetics and provide their sequence to other researchers.
Upscaling, Process Development and Business Plan
As the future prospects of our project were of great interest to us we consulted several experts (Prof. Dr. Karl Friehs, Dr. Joe Max Risse, Prof. Dr. Thomas Noll, Dr. Martin Schleef) on the topic to effectively upscale our project. Together we discussed what has to be done to implement our system into a market environment especially which aspects had to be considered in detail. The result was a business plan that in detail describes the measurements to be taken to found and effectively run a company. This also involves a summary of factors we decided on after carefully discussing different possibilities and methods with the consulted experts. Thus we collected all information considered vital for a company to be competitive on the market.
