Team:British Columbia/Project Outlook

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Consideration for Special Awards

Besides striving for a Gold Medal and a place as one of the finalists, our team would also like to be considered for the following special awards:

"What a society deems important is enshrined in its art." -Harry Broudy

Our human practices project presents the first iGEM art gallery dedicated to synthetic biology and all its diverse aspects. Sometimes art answers our deepest questions. Sometimes art only deepens the mystery. And sometimes a picture is just worth a thousand words. This is our way of helping human civilization consider, guide and address the impacts of ongoing advances in synthetic biology. Not limited to conventional artwork, our gallery also features synthetic biology promoter maps and poems. We also proudly present the first iGEM collaboration with NaNoWriMo to showcase 50,000 word novels featuring synthetic biology, written from scratch during the month of November!

"One of the most insidious and nefarious properties of scientific models is their tendency to take over, and sometimes supplant, reality." -Erwin Chargaff

Right before your eyes, watch how the population dynamics of a biofilm is affected by the introduction of bacteriophage and a biofilm matrix-degrading enzyme. Using our model, we are able to run simulations that predict outcomes of the system and construct informed hypotheses to test in reality.

"Acceptance of prevailing standards often means we have no standards of our own." -Jean Toomer

There are standards for prokaryotes and standards for eukaryotes. But what about standards for the living dead? Our new Phage standard lays down a foundation for future work involving viruses and integrating Biobrick parts into their genome. Prepare to be infected!!!

We've worked really hard on our wiki to make it accessible, fun and interactive! So we hope that future iGEM teams, students worldwide, and even the general public will visit us here and see what iGEM and synthetic biology is about!

Come and see our poster and team presentation! It will be a great opportunity to meet our team and learn more about our project. A soft copy of our poster and video of our presentation will be linked here during the Jamboree.

Several diseases and medical conditions are known to be caused by biofilm infections. Pathogens existing in biofilms survive under harsher conditions and are much more difficult to eliminate than free-floating pathogens. Our project aims to engineer a bacteriophage equipped with a biofilm matrix-degrading enzyme to eradicate pathogenic Staphylococcus aureus biofilms. Door knob, we shall fear thee no longer.