Achievements

From team member recruitment on, our team have run for 10 months towards our goal, to build a more secure platform for synthetic biology. Now, we believe that through these efforts, we have met the medal criteria:

Bronze Medal

Competition Deliverables:

Wiki

Project Promotion Video

Presentation Video

Judging Form (Submitted)

Judging Session

B2. Project Attributions

We have carried out detailed and clear responsibilities and recorded Attributions accurately.

B3. Project Description

We provide a comprehensive, clear, and interactive Description to our E² safe project.

B4. Contribution

We have made Contributions to iGEM in various aspects, from biological materials, laboratory skills to social value.

Silver Medal

S1. Engineering Success

In our project, we achieved Engineering Success by collaboratively completing the Design-> Build -> Test -> Learn -> Design cycle through both wet lab and dry lab experiments.

S2. Human Practices

We are concerned with the interaction of our project with society and the world, and we have influenced our community through various forms of multidimensional Human Practices .

Gold Medal

Based on our 10-month efforts, our team has successfully achieved our goal of developing a new biocontainment system without any addition of any exogenous chemical inducer to prevent the leakage of chassis organisms to the environment. However, we believe that the following three aspects of our work are most worth noting to everyone due to their inherent wisdom, close connection to the project, broad application prospects, and contributions to the iGEM community and synthetic biology.

G1. Excellence in Synthetic Biology

Best New Basic Part: BBa_K5259000

BBa_K5259000 is a plasmid. This plasmid contains an antitoxin gene under the control of a temperature-sensing promoter. Our team constructed this plasmid and successfully used it to induce cyanobacteria “suicide” in non-permissive conditions, such as natural environments with night temperature typically below 30℃, but grow normally under laboratory conditions (37℃).

The highlight of our temperature-sensing system with the part (BBa_5259000) avoids the addition of any exogenous chemical inducer, not only cutting down the cost but also decease any secondary chemical contamination. Additionally, temperature condition is a unique input signal characterized by its non-invasive nature, good penetrability, low cost, and reversibility which has not been used for environmental biocontainment previously, to our best knowledge. Moreover, this part (BBa_5259000) not only refers to the biocontainment of cyanobacteria, but can also be applied in other chassis organisms for synthetic biology with minor modification.

The successful construction of this part provides a valuable biosafety mechanism to prevent the leakage of lab organisms to the environment and may make a great contribution to the secure development of synthetic biology.

G2. Specializations

Best software tool: Visualization of Cyanobacterial mobility

To better illustrate the differences in cell mobility between different strains, we have developed a software AddTraj2Img.py to visualize the capability of cell motility by displaying cell trajectories directly on images.

To use this software, the prerequisite input files include time-lapse images and data files that contain information of tracked cells.

The output of the software are the modified images that contain marks at the center positions of tracked bacterial cells for a period from the first image (i.e. the earliest one among the whole images) to the current examined image.

Safety and Security Award: E² safe biocontainment system and relevant human practices

Our team built a double safe biocontainment system, which for realizes a new technical strategy the first time to address the potential dual-use risks of synthetic biology research without introducing any exogenous chemical inducer, so not any secondary contamination. This system not only takes killing system in considerations, but also allows for the mobility arresting before the death of the cyanobacteria, where mobility arresting is also novel. Together, the technique we developed and the cyanobacteria strain we engineered have a very high biosafety to prevent lab leakage, and the part and design could also be applied other chassis with minor modification.

Beside the development of new technique, we are also committed ourselves to promote the public awareness on the importance of biosecurity and the application of our technique in more research on synthetic biology. Our team organized a series of human practice activities, such as poster introduction, discussion with experts, Science popularization lectures to the peer high schoolers, and so on . All these activities and feedback made us be more confident with our system and technique roadmap. We hope that we can continue to perfect our biocontainment system and make more contributions to synthetic biology and biosecurity. We promise that we will practice our slogan “Science for Nature and Humanity” throughout in the future.