SENTINEL

Through our human practices it became apparent that there is a manual time-consuming step when conducting research about EDCs that involves going into the bibliography and trying to identify potential compounds that could interact with specific receptors. Once we started working on it we realized that limitation yourselves. For that reason we created SENTINEL (Sentence Extracting Networked Target Information using NLP and Exploration of Literature). SENTINEL could be a great help to future teams working on EDC in iGEM and beyond. Already two distinguished researchers from DTU and Utrecht University; Dr. Terje Svingen and Dr. Brigit van Brenk have expressed interest in a software with these capabilities.

Despite its young age, SENTINEL has already been used outside the EndoSense project, by 2024 UCopenhagen iGEM team.

You can read more about SENTINEL and its capabilities on our Software page.

Software Tool User Guide

We understand the challenges and limitations that often arise when working with informatics tools. It’s not just about the software's potential capabilities; it also involves the time and effort required for users to become familiar with the tool and fully leverage its functionality. To help our colleagues save time and enhance their experience with SENTINEL, we not only designed a user-friendly interface but also created a comprehensive user guide.

You can access the SENTINEL user guide here.

EndoSense

With our project we contributed to the iGEM repository and to synthetic biology in general. Our project introduced a series of Human Hormone binding receptors and their corresponding DNA binding sequences to the iGEM Repository. These include Glucocorticoid Receptor (GR) and Androgen Receptor (AR), and they could be used for various purposes in future projects.

We also introduced two functional composite parts:

These make up the backbone of our EndoSense EDC biosensor. These parts are based on the ROSALIND cell-free biosensor. They include the promoter and the broccoli reporting aptamer, but instead of the allosteric transition factors they utilize the Human receptors mentioned above.

This part has the ability to detect the presence of any compound that can interact and activate the receptor. It is an effect-based wide-range biosensor. It models the interaction inside human cells and can detect many different dangerous compounds, even if these are not identified beforehand.

Based on the Rosalind system, it is a low-cost, off-cell system. It is relatively low-cost, fast, and could be used in the field. These parts could be used for their intended purposes or modified for a different one.

You can read more about the EndoSense parts on our Parts page.