Description

Design

Experiments

Notebook

Results

Achievements

InterLab

Attributions

The majority of our project was completed by the members of our team. Everything we got help with is acknowledged below.

Attributions

General

-Rose-Hulman Biology and Biomedical Engineering Department for funding our iGEM summer team and project and for sending us to the Giant Jamboree.

-Dr. Anthony and Dr. Reizman for overseeing and advising the project as principal researchers.

-Rose-Hulman Office of Communications and Marketing for ensuring the legality of our logos and designs.

-Rose-Hulman’s Synthetic Biology Club for help with brainstorming project ideas.

-The Synthetic Biology Design class for help with brainstorming project ideas.

-Some inspiration for our project came from the 2012 UC Davis and 2016 Harvard iGEM team projects.

Laboratory

-Alexander LaCrampe, member of the 2016 RHIT iGEM team, for giving us advice on organizing our team structure and being available to answer lab questions.

-Maddie Muncie, member of the 2017 RHIT iGEM team, for being available to answer lab questions.

-Integrated DNA Technologies (IDT) for synthesizing our DNA parts and primers.

-Dr. Ella Ingram for giving advice on designing assays.

Outreach and Human Practices

-Dr. Timothy Chow for providing feedback on our public survey and meeting us to revise it.

-Dr. Diane Evans for providing us with contacts for local recycling experts and sharing information on her recycling initiatives on Rose-Hulman campus.

-Abigail Abernathy for helping stuff our PEBBLE mascots.

-Dr. Dan Morris, Rose-Hulman’s Institute Reviewer of the IRB for answering questions and reviewing/approving our community survey.

-Everyone who piloted and filled out our Human Practices community survey.

-Rose-Hulman Print Shop for printing our comic books, postcards, and trading cards.

-Dr. Jared Tatum, plastic specialist at Ampacet, for mentoring us on PET plastic behavior, creation methods, and industrial uses.

-Jane Santucci and Tribute Star Newspaper for doing a newspaper article on our project and spreading the word about our survey.

-Dale Long with Rose-Hulman Communications who helped spread the word about our survey and gave us more contacts for resources

Modeling

-Dr. David Goulet for being an available resource for our modeling questions.

-Dr. Irene Reizman for being an available resource for our modeling questions.

-Dr. Jared Tatum for informing our model about PET polymer behavior.

Wiki

-None of us had any website design experience, so many tutorials were done through the w3schools site to learn techniques for basic coding and animations.

-Our wiki's menu was partially inspired by the 2015 RHIT iGEM team

Synthetic Biology Design Course

Dr. Richard Anthony teaches a course in the spring to give students some insight to Synthetic Biology and to work on exploring and brainstorming ideas that can be turned into projects for the iGEM competition. "This course focuses on the design of novel biological parts, devices and systems, and their use in engineering cell function. Bioengineering principles and the design of genetic logic circuits, memory modules, biosensors and other cellular devices will be addressed. For the final project, students will design a novel biological system that meets the standards and goals of the International Genetically Engineered Machine Competition." [1] Two of our summer team members, Elisa and Emilie, enrolled in this course. We began having weekly meetings and brainstorming project ideas during our spring quarter, beginning March 5th. Ideas between our summer team's meetings and the class were exchanged, but we did not decide on the PEBBLE project until our summer team arrived on June 4th.

Starting June 6th, we began work in our Synthetic Biology laboratory and learned the basic protocols we would be using throughout the project. Throughout the summer, we worked ~40 hour weeks, furthering our outreach, modeling, design, and wiki portions. The last of our ordered DNA parts arrived on July 18th, so we began full work on the lab portion of our project in mid-July.

References:

• [1] “Course Descriptions,” Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology. [Online]. Available: https://www.rose-hulman.edu/academics/course-catalog/current/programs/Biology/bio-351.html. [Accessed: 02-Aug-2018].