Exeeding expectations.
The work done by each of our members and external help can be found on our Attributions page, which summarizes each member’s work in different parts of the project.
Look to our Project Description page to discover why and how we chose to tackle wastewater treatment.
Through the creation of multiple new parts, a bioethics report, a business plan, educational materials, and more, our team has provided many resources for future iGEM teams to learn from and build off of. To learn more, please visit our Contributions page.
As you will be able to find on our Engineering page, we went through multiple iterations of our immobilization method during our lab work, learning from and improving on the previous iteration each time!
On our Integrated Human Practices page, you will discover our vast exploration of our project, getting information from various groups, academia, government, and more. From these conversations, we got amazing feedback which we always attempted to implement in addition to confirmation of the product’s need.
We have made extensive efforts to design the necessary model to understand the relations between enzyme activity and environmental conditions.
Please look to our Education page to discover the impact we tried to have on our surrounding community. By reaching high schools, post-secondary, university students, and the general public through different initiatives, workshops, and events, our team was able to share its knowledge and bring the knowledge of others to light.
As you will see on our Integrated Human Practices page, we consulted with many individuals from many different fields to ensure that we were taking Proteus in the right direction. For each individual, we tried to really take what they said to heart and make sure their input had an effect on our project and our other initiatives.
To prepare ourselves for the iGEM competition this year, our team spent several meetings thoroughly reading the judging handbook to understand changes from last year to this year and trying to approach our project holistically, so that we could put forward the best project possible. Reading through the judging handbook was extremely beneficial, and we strongly urge all teams to examine these carefully to better understand excellence in synthetic biology, since there is a lot that can be learned from previous teams, in addition to all the great material, parts, and thinking that might inspire another project in the future.
Throughout our outreach activities and our social media as many stakeholders as possible, not only to get as much diverse feedback as possible so that we could gain perspectives we would otherwise miss about our project but also to inform the public about our environment and the proper disposal of pharmaceuticals. Our substantial human practices journey changed our project several times and changed the course of what we are now presenting as Byebuprofen. We aimed to constantly receive feedback throughout our project from various stakeholders so that every step of the way we would be listening to different views that may arise in the development of our project.
We have provided extensive documentation of all our conversations so that other teams interested in pursuing laccase degradation, not just enzyme degradation itself, and also a impactful and engaging project design to changing environmental conditions so that other teams can learn from our journey, and our learnings. At the start of our human practices journey, we were unsure what level of consultation with experts would truly help benefit our project, but the more conversations we had, the more we learned that every conversation was providing useful feedback and advice that would shape the decisions we made in our project.
In our educational initiatives, we aimed to not only teach what synthetic biology is but we rather sought to have constructive dialogues about it. Synthetic biology is not about forcing people to use a given set of tools, rather it is about creating a set of tools, that anyone anywhere could play around and build whatever they can imagine. Much like using a computer system, there is not one set way to approach a computational problem, and the same holds for synthetic biology. Through our educational initiatives, we strove to learn how to become better educators, and how to better explain the promise of synthetic biology.
These dialogues took place over many months, and the final product is what can be seen on our wiki. Every single one of our educational initiatives was a dialogue that we had with various stakeholders to see how we could serve them best, and promote an environment of mutual, and active learning. Even from our podcast, we had several people reach out to us, and start a dialogue about their misconceptions of what synthetic biology is when faced with questions from their children, students, or work colleagues such as “How clean is our river water?”.
Beyond just our educational initiatives, we strove to create strong local communities that can continue to enable more people to shape, contribute to, and participate in synthetic biology. From our educational to our inclusivity activities, we always made ourselves available to help and offer our network and guidance to anyone who was interested in participating in this domain.