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Team:KULeuven/Evaluation
From 2008.igem.org
UNDER CONSTRUCTION
Our road of the golden dream ...
At the end of a project people have often the intention to look just at the results. But the road towards these results are as much as important as these results, definitely when the same path has to be followed next year. Therefore we give you a reflection about our obtained results and the taken path.
During the summer period we've splitted our team into two major subteams: a lab team and a modelling team. This resulted in a very extensive model of our full system. The main effort building this model has been in the first six - seven weeks. During these weeks the model was gradually built and updated many times. A big part of the time we were searching the literature and the internet for the right values of all the parameters. For the parameters we couldn't find the any values, we took appropriote guesses. Every subsystem has extensively been tested and simulated before connecting them to each other. Hereafter we've further investigated the diffusion of HSL to the medium and the effect of multiple cells on the behaviour of one single cell. This resulted in one of our own written software tools: a multi-cell toolbox. During the entire summer, our modelling team have made a beautiful wiki on which our progress and results could be consulted at any time: we've been working as "open source" as possible.
While the modelling team were busy with building and simulation our Dr. Coli, the lab team were busy with connecting the different DNA sequences. Unfortunately, our lab team was very often withheld from a fast progress:
- punching the DNA: ...
- adjustments by the modelling team to the DNA sequence of different subsystems: While the modelling team was building the model, they often saw by simulations a malfunctional subsystem. This resulted in many changes of the DNA sequences of different subsystems. A great example was our memory. Our first memory would automatically switch from state zero to state one which makes it completely useless. This resulted in a totaly new memory system. Many ribosome binding sites have also often been upgraded or downgraded. These changes made many ligations useless and some work had to be redone. This was a big price to pay for the lab team for working in parallel with the modelling team. But we did not have many other choises because we had a very ambitious project and only 3 months time... As advise for the team of next year, we recommend to start modelling as soon as possible so that changes to the system don't lead to too much useless work.
- ...
Despite these obstacles, the lab team could finish different parts which resulted in some biobricks/ one biobrick (?).
TODO: hier nog iets zeggen over de behaalde resultaten in het labo
When it comes to the iGEM judging criteria, we believe we have fulfilled many different requirements like submitting the DNA sequence of a new biobrick: GFP with a LVA-tag. Furthermore this biobrick works as expected as experiments show a faster degradation than GFP without the LVA-tag. Based on these experiments we could even characterize the biobrick by determing its degradation constant. Besides these lab criteria we have also made an effort to make a contribution to the world on Ethics and Human Practices in synthetic biology by outlining and detailing an issue about these two subjects related to our project based on the Three Laws of Robotics formulated by Isaac Asimov halfway the twenthieth century. We were also proud to see some wiki-tools show up on other team's wikis. Based on all these facts, we started dreaming of a golden medal...
TODO: nog iets over grand prizes?
Personal Evaluation
Students
Maarten: "A once in a life time oppurtunity broadening your view in different aspects"
As a civil engineer, I started this project without a precise view on the expected work. It was a step in the dark. At the end, I can say that this once in a life time oppurtinity has broadened my view in many aspects:
- Till now I've only modelled based on the "black box system"-principle. This was the first time in my student carreer that I helped building a white box model based on biological laws.
- This project was a nice introduction to the world of synthetic biology which has been unknown to me till now.
- Working in a team with very different backgrounds is very representative to the real world. This experience will certaintly help me in my future working carreer.
As you can see, I'm glad I joined the project.
