Our team went through several false starts before executing multiple DBTL cycles.
January Engineering Design Cycle
February-April Engineering Design Cycle
May-June Engineering Design Cycle
July-August Engineering Design Cycle
Visit the Medals page for more information.
We attempted to design experiments based on ANOVA statistics to be applied after protein predictions made in software. We discovered this design was too ambitious and not suited to our resources.
We made a more practical attempt to proceed with enzymes and a simpler mathematical model particularly comparing models with Hill Coefficients to very basic models.
Christian led the Wet Lab team to successfully engineer microbial cell factories.
Building on the success of the June experiments, Nico proposed an innovative Python structure which is still under testing.
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