Brief Summary

Our main goal for this summer is to build a toolkit for the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans for use as a synthetic biology chassis. Our focus is on finding and selecting viable promoters, protein domains, and other components for use by future teams.

The motivation for our project is simple enough: to date, there has been little interest in using complex eukaryotic and multicellular organisms in iGEM, and we feel that the advantages of multicellular organisms outweigh the challenges involved in working with them.

The main focus of our project is encouraging other teams to embrace the potential benefits of working in a complicated organism like C. elegans, which has been extensively studied as a model organism for developmental biology and was the first multicellular organism sequenced. As such, it represents one of the best opportunities for iGEM-style synthetic biology to make inroads into higher forms of life.