Team:William and Mary/Medal Criteria
Medal Criteria Bronze
Bronze.
Your team must convince the judges you have achieved the following 6 goals:
Register for iGEM, have a great summer, and attend the Giant Jamboree. Silver
Experimentally validate that at least one new BioBrick Part or Device of your own design and construction works as expected. Document the characterization of this part in the Main Page section of the Registry entry for that Part/Device. This working part must be different from the part you documented in Bronze medal criterion #6. Gold In addition to the Bronze and Silver Medal requirements, your team must convince the judges you have achieved at least two of the following goals:
Choose one of these two options: (1) Expand on your silver medal Human Practices activity by demonstrating how you have integrated the investigated issues into the design and/or execution of your project. OR (2) Demonstrate an innovative Human Practices activity that relates to your project (this typically involves educational, public engagement, and/or public perception activities; see the Human Practices Hub for information and examples of innovative activities from previous teams). Special Prizes Basic Part, Composite Part, Part Collection, Measurement, Modeling, Practices
- Done!
Complete the Judging form.
- Done! See our complete judging form here.
Create and share a Description of the team's project using the iGEM wiki, and document the team's parts using the Registry of Standard Biological Parts.
- Done!
Present a poster and a talk at the iGEM Jamboree. See the 2015 poster guidelines for more information.
- Done!
Create a page on your team wiki with clear attribution of each aspect of your project. This page must clearly attribute work done by the students and distinguish it from work done by others, including host labs, advisors, instructors, sponsors, professional website designers, artists, and commercial services.
- Done!
Document at least one new standard BioBrick Part or Device central to your project and submit this part to the iGEM Registry (submissions must adhere to the iGEM Registry guidelines). You may also document a new application of a BioBrick part from a previous iGEM year, adding that documentation to the part's main page.
- Done! Visit our part page here.
- Done! Amongst other parts, the functional dCas9 and the R0010 guide RNA parts display successful repression of RFP driven by the R0010 promoter. See more here.
Participate in the Measurement Interlab Study. Submit measurement data to the committee by the study deadline (see iGEM 2015 calendar of events for details).
- Done! See the Interlab Measurement Study Page.
iGEM projects involve important questions beyond the bench, for example relating to (but not limited to) ethics, sustainability, social justice, safety, security, and intellectual property rights. We refer to these activities as Human Practices in iGEM. Demonstrate how your team has identified, investigated and addressed one or more of these issues in the context of your project. (See the Human Practices Hub for more information.)
- Done! We viewed the lack of information about the intrinsic noise of the promoters on the Registry as a safety concern, both within the field of synthetic biology and for the greater public. By measuring and publishing this information for three of the most frequently used iGEM promoters, we allow future teams and future scientists to better ensure the stability and safety of the genetic networks they create.
- Done! In keeping with our theme of informing and educating future scientists about how best to ensure the safety of their work, we conducted extensive outreach initiatives to promote greater awareness and understanding of synthetic biology in school systems and the public. These include:
- Creating an educational synthetic biology booklet with modules for students ranging through ages 5 - 18, coordinating with educational officials of Williamsburg/James City County Public Schools to implement this set of activities, and distributing this booklet for use in schools throughout the state of Virginia,
- Running 9 synthetic biology workshops throughout the state of Virginia to educate and inform students in primary and secondary school about concepts, applications, and safety concerns in the field, and
- Organizing a one-day exhibit with the Q?rius program of the Smithsonian National Museum System to bring the educational themes from the local workshops to the nation’s capital.
- For more information, please visit our practices page.
Help any registered iGEM team from a high-school, different track, another university, or institution in a significant way by, for example, mentoring a new team, characterizing a part, debugging a construct, modeling/simulating their system or helping validate a software/hardware solution to a synbio problem.
- Done! To summarize our other efforts from the collaboration page, we:
- Organized a pen pal program, featured on the iGEM website, to facilitate the establishment of collaborative relationships between teams around the world
- Provided Cambridge-JIC iGEM with fluorescent constructs with which to test their imaging process, and
- Measured fluorescent samples to provide data for UGA-Georgia iGEM’s project.
Demonstrate a substantial improvement over the state of the art in cost, efficiency, precision, resolution, and/or other relevant capabilities of your measurement technique or a previous iGEM team measurement project.
- By incorporating the dual reporter system and the associated mathematical theory developed by Michael Elowitz and coauthors, we demonstrate a measurement concept never before conducted in iGEM-- measuring noise for its own sake rather than as a consequence of a measured signal. The use of Elowitz et al’s theory to decompose the intrinsic and extrinsic components of transcriptional noise provides novel and unprecedented insights into the behavior of the promoters on the Registry, providing iGEM with a new metric by which to characterize these parts.
Demonstrate the ease of accessibility and/or portability of a new or existing measurement technique of your choosing. Document the use of the measurement technique in a lab other than your own on your team wiki.
- Done! Because we wish to instill a shift in the mindset of how iGEM teams view transcriptional noise, the reproducibility of our measurements is of utmost importance. In addition to providing detailed protocols and primer sequences on our Wiki, we also created a part, the galK Integrator, with which other teams can integrate reporter constructs under any promoter of their choosing to measure the intrinsic noise in the promoter.