Judging Criteria

Bronze

Register the team, have a great summer, and plan to have fun at the Regional Jamboree.

We have registered our team, had a great summer, and plan to have fun at the Regional Jamboree.

We have set up a team Wiki

We have completed the judging form

We have a poster and presentation , which we will be presenting at the Jamboree.

We have designed, built and extensively characterised several new functional Biobricks including

BBa_K1149051: an optimised bioplastic producing operon (hybrid promoter phaCAB)
BBa_K1149002: encodes carboxylesterase that breaks down ester bonds in polyurethane (PUR) (ESTC2)
BBa_K1149010: a bioplastic degradation enzyme
BBa_K1149050: Bdh2 3HB dehydrogenase enzyme
BBa_K1149020: a blue chromoprotein under the control of a constitutive promoter

We have extensively characterised several existing Biobricks including

BBa_K934001: a bioplastic producing operon (native phaCAB)
BBa_K639003: a stress induced biosensor

Silver

We have designed, built and extensively characterised several new functional Biobricks and submitted characterisation data to the parts registry see list above

Human Practices

We have explored environmental, societal, ethical, political and safety aspects of our project. Including how our project would fit into the current UK waste management industry.

We visited Powerday, a recovery and recycling centre in West London to learn about waste management in the UK. The visit directly influenced our project and even provided a source of recyclable waste which we used in our experiments.

"The waste and resource management sector is in a period of unprecedented change and so is a fertile ground for innovation and I look forward to seeing how this project develops... Finding new ways of recovering plastics will play a part in the resource efficient supply chains of the future". Simon Little (Powerday, Sales & Marketing Director)

We visited local government, the Greater London Authority (GLA) at City Hall to learn about the Mayor of London's vision for recycling. We learned that any new technology must fit within the context of the current waste management streams if it is to be implemented at an industrial scale.

"Imperial iGEM team's research project to extract valuable substances from non-recyclable waste that can then be used to make new products sits well with achieving the Mayor’s vision." Doug Simpson (Principal Policy and Programme Officer, Waste and Energy Team)

We completed and submitted our safety documentation and published general safety information on our wiki safety page We assembled a panel of experts, including synthetic biologists, social scientists and representatives of the bioplastics industry. We discussed at length the core societal, ethical and technological challenges surrounding waste management, recycling, synthetic biology and specific aspects about our project. A video is published on our wiki. This panel discussion helped us to realise that in order to realise waste as a valuable resource we must also consider an array of social implications, including how the general public feel about recycling. We also thought about the safety implications of how our technology would be implemented

Gold