Accomplishments

Our team had many accomplishments over the course of this summer.

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 for the use 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 team in order to build and better optimize the dszA desulfurization operon.

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

• Premiered and beta-tested a video game 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 software and hardware 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 an alternative enzyme to the PetroBrick (oleT) in 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 enzyme.

• 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 seperate 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!