Team:NRP-UEA-Norwich/Achievements
Achievements
Bronze
We’ve registered our team, had a great summer and are looking forward to the iGEM Jamboree! We’ve got a poster and a presentation ready to present there and we’ve completed our iGEM 2015 Judging form.
We’ve made a wiki including a description page.
We’ve put plenty of new parts in the Registry of Standard Biological Parts - there is a list on our parts page.
We’ve listed all the people who have helped and trained us on our attributions page.
Silver
We’ve experimentally validated several BioBrick Parts and submitted them to the registry. You can find data in the registry and on our results page.
There are significant ethical considerations with the production of bioengineered food supplements. By talking to cancer charities, people who run trials to test the effects of diet on health, and the public we found out that while the genetic engineering of food is still controversial in Europe, opinions may differ when the reasons for engineering are for the prevention of cancer. You can read all about these studies on our Practices page.
Gold
Advanced Practices
We have expanded on our Integrated Practices because we are making foods and food supplements about which we would like to make a health-claim. We investigated how we would collect data to show if our products reduce cancer incidence in humans. We consulted experts in the Medical and Nutrition Faculty who have expertise in designing intervention/feeding studies.
Having learned about what can be tested and measured and what de-regulation is needed for testing, we designed a theoretical feeding trial that they evaluated for us. Should we develop a product that performs in animal trials we could now progress to deregulation and funding for human trials. There are many projects aiming for healthier foods but few that consider how to prove this experimentally.
We believe this study is novel and worth highlighting to the iGEM community.
We also expanded on our outreach and communication activities. Norwich, our home city, is a UNESCO City of Literature. We wanted to find a way to work with published, and experienced creative writers to make the narrative about bioengineering available to a new audience. In initial discussions the topic of the contrasting emotions of awe and anxiety people feel about science and scientists came up and we decided to talk to professional poets about our project to see how their emotional responses would be communicated. The process was rewarding and is still ongoing as the creative writing process takes time.
We hope that our iGEM practices will encourage more teams (and scientists in general) to collaborate with professional writers and artists. We also hope to find avenues to share the writing with the wider community in our city.
Collaborations
We worked with three different 2015 iGEM teams to achieve different goals. You can read about our contributions to their projects on our Collaborations page.
Registry
We’ve improved the characterization of several parts submitted by the 2014 NRP-UEA iGEM team. Although our projects are not related, we have also used a plant chassis for part of our project and have assembled parts according to RFC106 to which last year's team contributed.
