Team:DTU-Denmark/Human Practices

Human Practices

Our team has put a lot of effort into utilizing many different avenues for communicating who we are and what we are doing. We have primarily focused on introducing the world to biotechnology and synthetic biology. That includes team members visiting large events in our local area, documenting our progress on our social media and educating 9th graders on the wonders of biotechnology. Last but not least, we have worked on starting the first iGEM team for high school students in Denmark.

Ecovative (Integrated Human Practices)

An important part of our project is making bricks out of fungi and since we are not the first to take this approach, we contacted Ecovative Design. They are the leading commercial manufacturer of fungal materials and we wanted to get their input on which features they could see us targeting for our project.

One of the suggestions from Ecovative was to integrate color changes into the mycelium, either in the form of chromoproteins or pigments, as this could be a huge market. Therefore, we started on assembling a chromoprotein cassette for insertion into the filamentous fungi. We have also assembled a melanin producing cassette which could give the material a darker look. All of these efforts could be attractive in the home decor market.
Secondly, if we could control the branching pattern or the cell wall thickness, it could be a huge leap in the structural abilities of the end products. We researched the possibilities and found the genes Gfa, which controls the synthesis of the cell wall (?) and ScGP-A, which controls the hydrophobins in S. commune. In addition to these genes, we modeled the growth on fungal mycelium and its branching pattern.

In parallel to working with the genetics of the fungal engineering, we also tackled the process of protoplasting and transforming filamentous fungi. Ecovative shared their protoplasting protocol with us and we got to work on implementing the protocol.
During our experimentation, we tried to optimize the protocol by substituting an expensive reagent with a more affordable one. We used higher concentrations of glucanex than originally in the protocol and different digestion times instead following the protocol with their digestion times and concentration of driselase (and got results that were very alike. This means that we can save money in the process and potentially increase the profitability of Ecovative Design.)

Snapchat takeover

We were lucky enough to be offered to take over the DTU snapchat account for one of the three days of the BioBrick Tutorial. Our vision in doing so was primarily letting the roughly 11,000 other DTU students get an inside view of what being a member of the DTU Biobuilders also means. The takeover happened before we had settled on a project, so the main focus was showing the event and bringin the audience along in the activities that took place during the 24 hours we had the account. On Saturday during the iGEM Jamboree, we will again take over the snapchat account and document our time in Boston - this time going a bit more in depth in communicating our project to the students.

Kulturnatten

At the yearly event of ‘Kulturnatten’ (Culture night), we had a stand together with the UCopenhagen iGEM team. We talked about our projects, biotechnology, the prospects of colonizing Mars. A lot of interested visitors came by and answered our questionnaire about whether they thought we should colonize Mars. A whopping 28 out of 36 participants thought that there would be a manned mission to Mars within the next 30 years. Furthermore, 24 participants thought that genetically engineered organisms could be useful for the survival of the colonists on the red planet. [The rest of the results can be found at UCopenhagens iGEM wiki (Insert link) ]