Demonstrate engineering success in a technical aspect of your project by going through at least one iteration of the engineering design cycle.
Demonstrate engineering success in a technical aspect of your project by going through at least one iteration of the engineering design cycle.
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Engineering success can be achieved by documenting your effort to follow the engineering design cycle: Design → Build → Test → Learn
We invite you to think about ways to tackle and solve one or more of your project's problems and use synthetic biology tools and/or experimental techniques to generate expected results.
When you have completed the cycle once, think about and document what changes in design you would make for the next iteration(s) of the cycle.
For example, you can design and build a new Part, measure its performance, document whether it worked or not, and propose how the results would inform the next design or steps (documentation must be on the Part's Pages on the Registry).
Visit the Engineering pages for additional guidance on engineering success.
The section below is a separate, independently-written draft, produced by a team member outside the main documentation process. Kept here for reference and comparison; not yet fact-checked by team leadership.
Four Design–Build–Test–Learn cycles are recorded — two failed, one inconclusive, one still in progress — on the argument that iGEM's Engineering Success criterion rewards honest iteration over a clean four-step loop with green checkmarks.
A constitutive J23119-driven PETase ORF, with the native signal peptide replaced by pelB for periplasmic export, was predicted to yield ~3 mg/L soluble enzyme in shake flask. Result: a band at the expected molecular weight was present but faint, and activity assay results showed large lane-to-lane variation — the null hypothesis could not be rejected. Decision: re-run with two anchor systems in parallel rather than continue tuning a soluble construct.
PETase expressed as a C-terminal fusion to the autotransporter Ag43, under arabinose induction. Two of three transformants showed PET-film mass loss and growth arrest within 4 hours of induction; membrane-integrity staining confirmed compromised outer membrane. Conclusion: Ag43 fusion at this expression level is membrane-toxic. Ag43 was dropped from the anchor screen in favor of Lpp-OmpA and INPNC.
Two independent kill switches in series: a temperature-sensitive lambda repressor (active above 30°C, cabin-relevant) and a blue-light-activated EL222 driving a colicin E1 self-lysis cassette. Each switch's stand-alone escape rate is being characterised independently, with a target of below 10⁻³ each, and below 10⁻⁵ jointly — contingent on the two switches sharing no common failure mode, since they act on disjoint targets (translation vs. transcription).
Cell-density-triggered auto-induction via a luxR/luxI circuit, to couple expression to actual substrate availability rather than wasting ATP on continuous induction at near-stationary density. Explicitly contingent on Cycle 03 closing successfully first.
Continue to Jett's Version of Results → · Back to Jett's Version of Description