Medal Criteria

Bronze

1. Our team completed the following competition deliverables: Wiki, Project Promotion Video, and Judging Form. Our Presentation Slides will be available on the wiki following the 2022 Jamboree.
2. We acknowledge those who have contributed to our project on the Team and Attributions pages of our wiki.
3. Many factors motivated and influenced the path of our project, such as the desire to advance green solutions using synthetic biology and the feedback we received from experts. The full story of our project is detailed in our Inspiration and Description pages on our wiki.
4. Our team contributed in many ways to the iGEM community. First, we designed basic and composite parts that will produce a cyanophage-based phagemid. These are described in detail on our Part Collection page. Our team also joined the 2022 iGEM Phototroph Community. Our contributions to this community can be found on the Collaborations page. Finally, our team participated in iGEM’s InterLab Measurement Study. The details of this collaboration can be found on our Contribution page.

Silver

1. Our team achieved engineering success in two key ways: first, in the design of a cyanophage phagemid and second, during design of an interactive museum exhibit. Throughout the process, we met with many experts, implementing their feedback into design changes. More information about the engineering success of our project can be found on our Engineering page.
2. We collaborated with other iGEM teams in multiple ways. We partnered with team Maastricht due to our common interest in Cyanobacteria, realizing that we could both benefit from each other’s work. Upon completion of our phagemid, they could help us by field testing it. To aid them, our team proposed tagging the capsid of our phagemid with biotin, which could bind and immobilize the Cyanobacterial strain they were designing. Details of this collaboration are on our Partnership page. We also collaborated the Phototroph Community. More information regarding this partnership can be found on the Collaborations page of our wiki.
3. Our project was driven by the desire to impact our community, and even the whole world, with a positive, responsibly developed contribution to synthetic biology. We believe that construction of our phagemid will achieve this by furthering capabilities of synthetic biologists who are turning Cyanobacteria into microscopic factories for the green production of proteins, plastics, biofuels, and more. To ensure that development of our project proceeded responsibly, we communicated with the Safety Committee before beginning any design work. More information concerning these matters can be found on our Human Practices and Notebook pages.
4. Our project consisted of designing a phagemid containing only the structural proteins of the S-TIP37 Cyanophage. We envision this phagemid being developed further with addition of payload delivery genes. To allow for immediate use of our ghost phage, our team added a biotin tag to the capsid protein to allow for immobilization of Cyanobacteria. Another portion of our project is the Build-a-Phage museum exhibit. We plan to complete the final design after one last round of engineering and set up the exhibit in the A. J. Read Science Discovery Center. Full details of completed and planned execution of our project can be found on our Implementation page.

Gold

1. Our team fully integrated our human practices by incorporating the feedback we received from experts and stakeholders to hone and shape our project. One key example is the information we received from correspondence with Dr. Stephan Klahn. His feedback regarding Cyanophages directed our team to select a generalist cyanophage strain rather than a specific one and enhanced our bioinformatics efforts. For more information on how our team integrated each piece of feedback from experts, see our Human Practices page. Additional evidence of integrated human practices is provided on our Education page, which describes how feedback was included in iterations of our museum exhibit design.
2. Partnering with Team MSP-Maastricht greatly shaped the course of our project. During initial correspondence with them, they shared their struggle to immobilize their engineered Cyanobacteria. We realized we could solve this immobilization issue for them by including a biotin tag on the capsid of our ghost phage. This directed us to select S-TIP37 as the source of genes for our phagemid. Our teams plan to continue collaboration in the future once our phagemid is fully constructed. For more details on our collaboration with MSP-Maastricht and the plans we have for future collaboration, visit our Partnership page.
3. It was important to our team that we communicate accessible information regarding synthetic biology and our project. Because of current events involving the pandemic and the fact that our project involves a virus, we wanted provide educational materials on the nature of bacteriophages, their life cycle, and how they can be used for positive purposes. We designed, constructed, and are implementing an interactive museum exhibit that will be installed in the A. J. Read Science Discovery Center. The details of this work, as well as information regarding presentation of our project to the public at our school’s annual research showcase, visit our Communication and Education pages.