Spider Silk Partnership
Why Spider Silk?
Spider silk is a novel and promising protein in the realm of synthetic biology; our decision to work with it in our project set us on quite a difficult journey, especially at the beginning of our project. However, we weren't alone in this battle - we quickly found like-minded teams to meet and connect over this challenge. Soon enough, it was a partnership: we started having regular meetings with the iGEM Teams Copenhagen, Bochum, and Lausanne, as they are also working with spider silk. Our intentions were to share our protocols, experiences, and struggles and, this way, to help each other out. Eventually, we realized how valuable our little collection of knowledge could be to future iGEM teams and other research groups, so we decided to write it down and create a digital repository with all spider silk-related sequences, protocols, and tutorials that we used throughout our project, making it one of our major contributions to future teams. Additionally, we made a series of Instagram posts, educating other iGEM teams and the general public on possible, fascinating applications of spider silk.
Our "Partners in Silk"
Nylon fishing nets take 600-800 years to degrade completely and are a big contributor to microplastic pollution in the ocean. Additionally, ghost nets cause the deaths of hundreds of thousands of marine animals each year. IGEM Copenhagen is tackling the issues of ghost fishing and microplastic pollution by producing a novel biomaterial using a combination of proteins found in nature to substitute nylon in fishing nets.
Temperature regulation of buildings accounts for 60% of the energy consumed by European households and 10% of global CO2 Emissions. While insulation allows us to reduce that consumption, at the moment almost all insulation waste in Switzerland is either burned or ends up in landfills. To tackle this, iGEM EPFL is developing sustainable insulation materials based on spider silk.
Timeline
About the Repository
The repository is a collection of protocols and data that our three teams worked on regarding spider silks. It contains an introduction to our design processes, sequences of all the plasmids that we worked with, as well as protocols, and tips on how to work with the silks. To us, it was important to give future iGEM teams inspirations and motivations to work with such a versatile material. Due to the diversity of projects represented in this repository, we believe this repository to be a great ressource we can contribute to iGEM projects to come!
Find the pdf version here.
Educational Instagram Posts
To educate our followers on the wide variety of applications of spider silks and to encourage people to work with this material in the future, we made a collaborative Instagram post showing what applications we use our silks for. We introduce the projects of our partners and ours, explicitly stating the intended function of spider silk in these projects. The posts were adjusted to the teams chosen color scheme to fit the overall themes of their social media feeds.
Partnership reflection.
At the beginning of our project, working with spider silk was quite intimidating for us. It helped a lot to not be alone in this and to have the encouragement, support, and help from the other two teams. The exchange of ideas and tips in our meetings was incredibly valuable and we would not have made the progress in our project that we have made without it. In general, we are excited to meet the teams face-to-face in Paris and see the results of their hard work; of course, we are also excited to show them how far we came thanks to everybody's help and support.