Team:BostonU/Medals
Bronze Medal:
1. Registration and Giant Jamboree Attendance
The BostonU iGEM Team has registered and is going to the Giant Jamboree.
2. Competition Deliverables
Completed the four required deliverables, wiki, poster, presentation, and judging form, including the safety forms.
3. Attributions
Detailed the attributions to this project here.
4. Characterization / Contribution
Participated in the interlab study, as documented here.
Silver Medal:
1. Validated Part / Validated Contribution
The BostonU iGEM Team has sent in three BioBricks for evaluation. The first, BBa_K2805002, is mRuby reporter backed by a C120op-based promoter site that is activated by LOV2, a blue light inducible transcription factor. Our second, BBa_K2805003, is the plasmid that codes for the LOV2 protein. When this protein is exposed to blue light, the helix turn helix DNA binding domains become exposed due to a conformational change, which allows the protein to interact with a promoter site. BBa_K2805004 is a composite part with both BBa_K2805002 and BBa_K2805003. A cell expressing both of these genes exposed to light between 450-490 nm will produce red fluorescent proteins.
More on our BioBricks: BBa_K2805002 BBa_K2805003 BBa_K2805004
2. Collaboration
In collaboration with our sister team, BostonU HW, we organized and hosted the Northeastern iGEM Meetup at Boston University, where 5 teams were in attendance and made presentations in front of an audience. At the meetup, teams were able to gain insight on how to improve their presentations and how they should continue with their project through feedback forms and questions from the audience. Find out more here.
3. Human Practices
Our efforts in promoting sustainable lab actions have yielded measurable reductions in CO2 emissions, waste production, and water consumption. We designed a two week-long iGEM Sustainable Labs Challenge hosted on the Sustainability@BU app, in which teams tracked sustainable actions such as sharing autoclave cycles or powering down equipment to earn points. Targeting three major areas in which impact could be reduced, BostonU and participating teams diverted 98 pounds of waste, reduced CO2 emissions by 1300 pounds, and saved 2900 gallons of water. We created GreenGEM, an online repository which documents best practices for sustainability so future teams can improve lab best practices. Following the success of the iGEM Challenge, BostonU is broadening the scope of our efforts by facilitating a Biological Design Center Sustainability Month, which will feature an expanded challenge between labs at Boston University. BostonU is spearheading sustainable practices, helping Boston University Sustainability pilot a Green Labs Initiative. Find out more about our human practices and GreenGEM. In addition, we ran several outreach events to introduce students of varying ages to synthetic biology. BostonU participated in panels, improving upon past activities for students, and leading bioethics forums. These experiences were valuable for exposing young students to synthetic biology. Read more about our public outreach here.
Gold Medal:
1. Integrated Human Practices
We focused on incorporating what we learned about sustainable lab practices into our daily routine at the lab. At first, this took the form of reusing gloves and recycling cardboard boxes. Soon after, we built up to committing to preliminary experiments in the shaking incubator. The eVOLVER, the novel culturing platform we used to characterize our strains, uses up about 3 liters of media per 8 hour experiment. By conducting preliminary experiments in the shaking incubator that require tens of milliliters of media, we can make sure that only working yeast colonies are shuttled into larger eVOLVER experiments, saving media as well as the great amounts of energy used to autoclave media. Read more about how we changed how we conducted our science here.
3. Model Your Project