Together as a team, we created the Wiki Page providing all important information about the B.L.I.S.S. project.

The Project Promotion Video was made to encourage people to accompany us on our way to the grand jamboree.

We shot the Presentation Video and explained our visions in more detail.

The Judging Form was provided on time.

We will be joining the Grand Jamboree and the Judging Session in person.

We successfully built up an interdisciplinary team of students from all kinds of scientific backgrounds. Together with our amazing advisors, we brought out the strengths in everyone to help reach our goals. Attribution List shows everybodies contributions to the team (view here).

Our Project Description tells the story of how our project found us and our vision of the whole-cell biosensor for antibiotic detection in wastewater. View it here.

The following Contributions were made by our team to iGEM (view them here):

• As pioneers in establishing an iGEM team at Goethe University in Frankfurt, we've faced challenges. We're sharing our knowledge by adding a How to Start an iGEM Team section to our wiki, to help future teams in Frankfurt and worldwide.
• During our project, we faced challenges, including low plasmid yields, which we successfully addressed. Sharing our knowledge will aid future iGEM teams in troubleshooting similar issues.
• We established a cheap and robust application platform for biosensors on paperstrips and in alginate capsules.

Engineering Success:
We designed a modified two-component system for the detection of β-lactam antibiotics and were able to express parts of it in E. coli cells. Thereby, we established the necessary foundation to continue with the successful assembly of the biosensor and went through several design-build-test-learn cycles (view here) to establish two platforms upon which our whole-cell biosensors will operate. To do this we:

• successfully encapsulated living cells into alginate capsules, while preserving their responsiveness to the external environment.
• prove that the cells' ability to stay alive on a paper strip and their reliable reactivity to chemicals dissolved in water.

Human Practicies:
Talking to experts and stakeholders from various fields gave us different perspectives on the usage of antibiotics and the problems associated with it, the biggest one being antibiotic resistant bacteria. Our discussions with experts led us to the compelling conclusion that the development of a β-lactam biosensor holds the potential to actively help in saving lives in an ethical and economically viable manner all around the world. Learn more about our outreaches here.

Model:
With the help of several computational approaches, we were able to predict the promoter region for BlaA and a potential enhancer region for VbrR of the VbrK/VbrR two-component system. This will ultimately help optimise the biosensor plasmid.
We successfully found mutants of the sensor domain of BlaR1 in silico that result in higher binding affinities for ampicillin. Thereby, we introduced a novel approach to identify receptor mutants tailored for specific ligands (want to know more here).

Education
A big part of our project was educating the broad public about the misuse of antibiotics and the resulting risk of antibiotic resistances. On one hand, we used every opportunity to go speak at schools, present our project at the university and raise awareness at info events. On the other hand, we had a broad media presence, talking to our audience on social media, speaking in an educational podcast and lastly appearing in a well known science magazine, BIOspektrum (want to know more here).

Integrated Human Practices
During our research we talked to a lot of different stakeholders in the field of antibiotics like physicians, researches and staff from wastewater treatment plants . The common assessment being that antibiotics in wastewater directly impact the environment and human health and a solid means of preventing this problem is needed. When asked about the B.L.I.S.S. biosensor, our experts gave some valuable opinions which we greatly appreciated. Among other things they said the product was very helpful, easy to use and also adaptable. Along with great feedback we also received a number of suggestion we will use to level up our product in the future (want to know more here)