Accomplishments

Our team had many accomplishments throughout the summer of 2012!

Please see the Post Regional page for our results between Regionals and the Finals!

In our Human Practices project, we...

• Established a dialogue between industry experts in order to inform the design of our project.

• Led a discussion through the oil sands leadership initiative (OSLI) on the need and potential usefulness of synthetic biology in the oil sands.

• Submitted novel riboswitch, promoter and regulatory parts for use in the tight control of killswitch applications and beyond.

• Submitted and characterized both a magnesium riboswitch/promoter GFP construct and a magnesium riboswitch/promoter kill gene construct.

• Partnered with the UBC iGEM team in order to build and better optimize the dsz desulfurization operon.

• Showcased our project to our city and the world through various outreach initiatives including a TEDxCalgary City 2.0 talk.

• Premiered and beta-tested our video game LAB ESCAPE! at the Calgary Telus Spark World of Science.

In terms of FRED, we...

• Constructed a transposon library in Pseudomonas, identifying two positive hits sensitive to a variety of tailings pond toxins.

• Submitted and electrochemically characterized the function of two novel hydrolase enzymes from E. coli, demonstrating the validity and potential of a triple-output system with high sensitivity and little background noise.

• Designed and wet-lab verified a kinetic model of electrochemical gene expression.

• Designed both hardware and software for a biosensor prototype.

In terms of OCSAR, we...

• Demonstrated the successful conversion of naphthenic acids into hydrocarbons using Washington 2011's PetroBrick.

• Documented the functionality of the enzyme OleT, an alternative enzyme to the PetroBrick for producing alkenes from fatty acids.

• Modified an existing xylE part to show the degradation of catechol into a product, which is then degraded into hydrocarbons using the PetroBrick or OleT.

• Designed, built, and tested a functioning bioreactor system in which to house our toxin degrading strain.

• Used flux variability analysis to optimize the production of our hydrocarbons, surpassing Washington’s previous results through modification of growth media.

• Demonstrated the successful degradation of carbazole and DBT by our model strains.

• Submitted sequenced BioBricks for the removal of nitrogen and sulfur from various compounds and mutagenized eight separate genes to remove illegal cut sites.

• Submitted and characterized a new catalase generator as well as a novel oxido-reductase enzyme for use in our desulfurization project.

• Had an amazing summer and learned a ton!