Achievement - Wet Lab! Our team is proud to announce that our first biobrick ‘Temperature regulated Gas Vesicle Polycistronic gene cluster composite’ is up on the registry and can be find at the following link: http://partsregistry.org/Part:BBa_K729000 Second piece of good news is that Prof John Ward (one of our iGEM advisors) has agreed to provide us the following organisms: Deinococcus radiodurans (required for salt tolerance module) as well as Rhodococcus ruber strain C208 (this contains the laccase gene which is crucial to our degradation module). Having an access to these organisms assures that we are on our way of being fully prepared for the construction of degradation and salt tolerance modules.

Achievement – Lush Article. An article written by Martina regarding the relevance of our project to the cosmetics industry was published on the Lush website. Lush is a company which produces and sells environmentally-friendly cosmetic products, but also makes a large effort to raise awareness about these issues. This is relevant to our project, because some of the microplastic contribution to the oceanic pollution comes from ‘run-off’ plastics – for example microplastics found in exfoliators, make-up and other products. We feel publishing this article was an important action as it put our message out to a community that is not necessarily of a scientific background, but who may be inspired by its relevance to their values. Outcome: Gain of publicity, and created an interface that will attract a new and very different audience, who may not necessarily find out about our research otherwise