Team:IISc-Bangalore/Philosophy

Philosophy

Real problems, realistic solutions

The first step towards forming an iGEM team from the institute was taken in the month of December 2017 when a meeting was held with the latest batch of undergraduates who had joined the institute. The IISc-Bangalore iGEM Team from 2017 briefed the upcoming team on how to go about participating in the competition and the values that needed to be upheld. One of the most important things that came out of the meeting was the need to have a project idea based on a pre-existing problem and not the other way around. It is much easier to land on a very nice implementation for a biologically engineered system and then try to draft a problem around it. However, this turns out to be much harder in the long run when an idea has to take flight beyond iGEM and has to reach the general public, something very close to our ethos.

Considering this, our brainstorming sessions were oriented around problems that we saw around us and that had not so obvious solutions. The way we landed on the present idea can be found in the Searching for problems section of our Integrated human practices page.

Antibiotic resistance was something that came up late into the discussion because of our belief that a lot of other people were already working on one or the other component of this problem. On having a meeting with our PIs, however, we realized that while it was a very visible problem, there were no clear alternatives to modern antibiotics except bacteriophages, a solution that seemed to be making a slow comeback. Thus asking questions about how phages won’t suffer the same fate as antibiotics, we came up with PhageShift, an idea that will have applications in antibacterial therapeutics as well as other fields of research.

Making mistakes, and making them visible

A good part of every project goes into making mistakes that serve as a lesson for the future. Even in our case, mistakes formed an integral part of the project work; both inside and outside the lab. Whether it be using the wrong strain for transformation or forgetting to vortex the dilutions, every step of the process was documented and propagated among the whole team so the mistake is not repeated.

For phage work especially, we found that there is not enough information for teams to realise the problems with their protocols. As such, we decided to write a primer for phage work containing all the protocols that have been tried and tested by us. For more information, have a look at the Working with phages section of our collaborations page.

Out of the lab, into the office

Handling the administration of an iGEM team is not something that comes easily. Paying the various registration fees, processing finances, ordering consumables, booking tickets etc. are all activities that require a high degree of coordination with the institute and iGEM. This year, we decided to have a more straightforward approach to admin work where the first priority was given to tasks that were integral for us to participate in iGEM as a team. Following this, we also noted down important guidelines for the future teams from the institute. For example, we realized that seven days are not sufficient for the finance office to make a wire transfer because of the amount of paperwork involved on the side of the institution. We took this into account the second time we had to make a wire transfer for Jamboree registration and initiated the process much earlier.

Persistence

We believe that the act of trying an experiment n number of times without success is very important for it to succeed on the n+1th try. Every trial adds something new to our knowledge of the experiment and allows for a better execution on the subsequent trial. As such, the numerous failures we encountered on the way were not as disheartening as they would’ve been without this proposition to guide us through. From trying the interlab experiments multiple times only to realize that we weren’t doing the dilutions properly to finding out that our protein is forming inclusion bodies, the number of trials helped us realize mistakes that we hopefully won’t make in the future.

Persistence in work, in spite of the number of failures we faced, paved a way for the team to carry out their work without any major roadblocks.

Responsibility

Throughout the course of the competition, we strived hard to carry out our project in a responsible manner. Whenever we had a doubt, such as on working with colistin resistant strains before beginning our lab work, or on the copyright of the book we are publishing, we reached out to iGEM HQ who were prompt and helpful in their response. Our education and public engagement activities were carried out keeping in mind that phage therapy still hasn't found scientific consensus, and thus we should not glorify or sell the idea. Our software pipeline was built using only tools with GNU GPL license clearly mentioned, thus allowing for its distribution, and any software whose license was unclear was to be downloaded directly from the source.

After iGEM

A team that truly believes in the applicability of their project will realise that there are opportunities even after iGEM that can help take their ideas forward. PhageShift is something we believe can form a base of innovation for building specific and customizable antibiotics in the future. The first step would be to make phages a more acceptable form of medication, something we’ve tried to do with our human practices endeavors. The second step would be to grow out of iGEM and aim for a more in-depth study into phage-bacteria interactions that will develop out of our modifications - which cannot be done in the time-frame of a single iGEM competition.