Team:Calgary/Project/Accomplish

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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!