Parts
The modular nature of R bodies as a drug delivery platform represents a significant contribution to future research, providing immense potential for innovation. By successfully demonstrating that all of our R body constructs can be expressed and conjugated with molecules, including aldoxorubicin, our team has elucidated that this platform offers extreme flexibility and versatility for targeted therapeutic applications.
Different linkers and conjugation techniques lend themselves to very different uses and the demonstrated modularity of this platform has expanded the toolkit for synthetic biology applications, which may ultimately impact academic research and clinical practice and be the key to solving real world problems. What remains for future groups (either in iGEM or beyond) is to build upon this fundamental work and see if conjugated R bodies have a demonstrated biological effect.
For more information on our parts, visit our Parts page.
Engineering Philosophy Statement
Synthetic biology, and more specifically, iGEM, is grounded in the ethos of collecting, collating and correlating biological information with systems behaviour. Occasionally however, there are times when particular information about a biological system is limited despite much information at the system output level, and synthetic biologists must engage in a “black box” top-down engineering approach. Such was the challenge our team faced throughout our project.
Early on our work was inspired by the seminal work ‘Synthetic Biology - a primer’ by Baldwin et al. and our team built upon its vision of a systematic, iterative design process predicated on modularity, orthogonality and characterisation in our Engineering work. We summarised its principles and adapted them to our use case, and the resulting document will be a useful guide for future iGEM teams to refer to in designing and planning out their own projects. It includes:
- Our vision
- Embracing an Engineering Mindset in Biology
- Iterative design process
- Future directions and long-term vision
The full document can be accessed here:
Therapeutics Interview Series
Our interviews with experts were not only the most integral part of our Human Practices work, but they fostered the largest shifts in rethinking our project design and implementation. We have made some of these discussions publicly available as a Therapeutics Interview Series, so that future iGEM teams (especially those in therapeutics) can derive as much value from them as we did. We hope to kickstart a similar process of reflection for future teams, and inspire them to conduct their own discussions with stakeholders. Talking to stakeholders was such an enriching experience for our team, not just for Human Practices but for other aspects of our project including Engineering and Entrepreneurship. We found that it gave our work so much more meaning (e.g. optimising R body purification with the ultimate aim of achieving the purity required for therapeutics) instead of only focusing on the next experiment in the lab, and we want other teams to be able to have this experience too. We give our warmest appreciation to the stakeholders featured in the interviews – Dr Sanjeev Kumar, Dr Kristina Cook, Dr Peter Wich and Professor Palli Thordarson – who have kindly given us their permission to publish their expertise for future iGEM teams. You can watch the interview series below, with accompanying notes of these and other interviews on our Human Practices page:
We encourage teams to watch these interviews (and conduct their own stakeholder interviews) with the Human Practices Cycle in mind. The Human Practices Cycle can be thought of as the design-build-test-learn Engineering Cycle iterating using stakeholder insights instead of experimental results. We gathered key takeaways from each interview we conducted that we then used to inform future considerations of our project, spanning our experimental work during the iGEM timeframe, to manufacturing and clinical trial designs which may not be implemented until years later.
Education Framework
In our education efforts this year, we conducted workshops with schools, university students, and various other groups, inspiring them in the field of synthetic biology. However, we wished to go beyond simply engaging our target audiences - we aimed to create a resource that would continue to grow and evolve, aligning with some of the core elements of education in iGEM. As such, we developed the following framework resource to be used by future iGEM teams during the brainstorming phase of outreach activities to ensure that synthetic biology outreach continues to expand and inspire new generations. This was motivated by our collaboration with educators at the University of Sydney, whose extensive experience in outreach provided a wealth of insights into how to engage the public in science. This resource is a distilled version of 4 months of knowledge from collaborating with USyd educators, with reference to iGEM’s guidelines. This resource is designed to help future University of Sydney and other iGEM teams create more engaging and effective events - it serves as a tool for brainstorming how to best tailor outreach activities to diverse audiences, ensuring synthetic biology is accessible and exciting for all types of students and participants.
You can read more about our Education work here!
