2016 Imperial College London Igem Team

The 2016 Imperial College London iGEM team's official Facebook page.

We began our brainstorming in late June by trying to identify key challenges facing the world today, such as climate change and antimicrobial resistance. This led us to consider how synthetic biology might be be used to solve the problems that we had identified. We considered different project proposals, and formed smaller sub-groups tasked with researching those proposals, before pitching them to PhDs, post-docs, and PIs from Centre for Synthetic Biology at Imperial College. We also collaborated with students from the Royal College of Art, who challenged us to be more creative in our brainstorming and to consider the actual applications for our theories.

The feedback we received during these sessions was very useful in refining our ideas. We deconstructed our project proposals into their component parts, which helped us to identify the most interesting aspects of our proposals. We discarded those aspects of our project proposals, which we deemed to have less practical value. The proposals that we finally settled on, as potential projects, included the following: bacterial associative learning, biosilica production, cell-free antimicrobial peptide production, genetic Turing machines, and sonogenetics. Many of our preferred project proposals relied on complex genetic circuits that would be impractical to construct in a single chassis.

Our group settled on the concept of synthetic ecology as a means of spreading complex circuits and pathways across multiple microbial populations as our project proposal. After talking to researchers at Imperial, we realized that although interest in the area was widespread, there was a lack of standardized approaches for working with co-cultures. Our objective is therefore to develop a framework for working with co-cultures that can be used by other iGEM teams in the future. Furthermore, we aim to demonstrate the effectiveness of our system by applying it to a critical challenge, such as renewable chemical and material production, waste treatment, or bioremediation.