▪ Our team became part of the Alzheimer association’s ISTAART program over the summer. This made us eligible for accelerator grants provided by the organization.
▪ We participated in the End Alzheimer’s walkathon and raised over $100 to the cause.
▪ We spoke to Leeza’s place and the East Carolina chapter of the Alz association, for our human practices discovery interviews. We gained patient and caregiver perspectives from these interviews.
▪ We would like to acknowledge the $2500 grant awarded by the iGEM Impact grant and the NC State Office of undergraduate research.
▪ Bloom Sciences, Synlogics therapeutics and Z Biotics helped model our project design. They gave us additional insights into gut biosafety when engineering probiotics.
▪ Genes in Space and minipcr were collaborators in our education initiative.
▪ DNA synthesis by Twist Biosciences.
▪ Genscript and CRISPR Hub helped us with public engagement and engagement.
Section II- Symposiums
Team NCSU presented our work at three noteworthy symposiums hosted by NC State University’s Office of undergraduate research (OUR).
▪ At the Spring sidewalk symposium, we created diagrams of our overall proposal and the human practices effort.
▪ At the Spring Symposium, we presented our proposal for the wet lab.
▪ At the Fall symposium, models and designs for the dry lab were presented.
Section III- Collaborations
TriGEM Jamboree 2023: Duke and University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill iGEM
The three iGEM teams in the Research Triangle Park (RTP) came together for a mini Jamboree on September 30 2023. TriGEM was a joint hybrid research symposium in collaboration with Duke University, North Carolina State University (NCSU), and The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC) iGEM teams. Team members from each respective iGEM team presented their progress and plans within the field of synthetic biology for the second year in a row.
We hosted this research meeting to unite the synthetic biology community in the Research Triangle Park area and uplift one another and celebrate the current successes in our research, human practices endeavors, and educational outreach.
As part of this initiative, Team NCSU created a Synthetic Biology educational initiative for high schoolers participating in the Genes in Space competition. We curated content and held live zoom sessions during the competition for a class of 20 high schoolers, in partnership with minipcr. UNC and Duke iGEM created hands on kits to supplement our video lectures.
iGEM North America: Mid-Atlantic meetup
On August 11 2023, Team NCSU participated in the Mid Atlantic meetup hosted by the University of Virginia at Charlottesville.Our team lead, Neha presented our work and received feedback from other teams at the event. You can find our presentation here-
Team participated in Princeton iGEM’s virtual biosecurity simulation on October 6, 2023.There were many great takeaways from this MUN style virtual event and is a great way to get young scientists involved in the global diplomacy related to biosecurity.
▪ Global diplomacy is critical for biosecurity because biological threats like pandemics cross borders and require international collaboration beyond the scope of any single nation.
▪ International norms and shared priorities for biosecurity need to be negotiated through global diplomacy. This involves bringing together scientific experts, public health professionals, and an understanding of diverse local contexts.
▪ There is a need to train a new generation of global biosecurity experts who are skilled in countering biological threats and integrated into diplomatic processes and networks. They can help assess threats, identify vulnerabilities, report on emerging technologies, and negotiate international biosecurity norms.
Find our proposed technical implantation under the Design part of our wet lab.
Team NCSU completed the Entrepreneurship summer school hosted by iGEM Startups on July 15-16 2023.
▪ Initially, we considered our customer segment to be patients predisposed to neurodegenerative diseases, as determined by our open source dry lab diagnostic tool.
▪ After the Ginkgo bioworks mentorship session, we realized that our design can be used as a platform to engineer non-model gut microbes into therapeutics for a range of metabolic diseases.
▪ Further research demonstrated that this can also be true for livestock farming. For example, Clostridium butyricum has been proven to improve rumen fermentation in goats and cows, engineering this probiotic to enhance metabolic pathways will help raise healthier livestock (Cai et.al, 2021)
We created this lean business model canvas to demonstrate the potential of our platform for engineered probiotics in metabolic disease therapeutics-
References
Cai L, Hartanto R, Zhang J, Qi D. Clostridium butyricum Improves Rumen Fermentation and Growth Performance of Heat-Stressed Goats In Vitro and In Vivo. Animals (Basel). 2021 Nov 15;11(11):3261. doi: 10.3390/ani11113261. PMID: 34827993; PMCID: PMC8614545.
