Contribution
At the Ohio State iGEM 2023 Team, we've embarked on an ambitious project for the delivery of therapeutic proteins. Through our journey, we've accumulated knowledge, resources, and tools that we believe will be invaluable to future iGEM teams. Here's how we hope our work paves the way for others:
We've delved into the intricacies of the T3SS and documented our findings. Our comprehensive review of the literature, key takeaways, and identified points of improvement can serve as a foundation for teams wishing to explore this field. To review these condensed findings and understand the platform better, teams can reference the project description here.
The team decided that our model needed stronger ties to synthetic biology. We focused on developing a program to optimize the lead sequences of designed therapeutic proteins, specifically nanobodies. For an ideal Therapeutic Nanobody (TNb), the lead sequence will maximize the desired biological activity of our nanobody, and if future teams use this platform they now have a documented platform to start from.
Our model is currently optimizing biological activity from randomly generated values for each new biological generation that is generated. However, if another team defines their biological activity parameters and determines several activity values experimentally over time, they could use this framework to optimize the lead sequence with respect to any number of desirable biological activities. For example, nanobody binding to substrate, nanobody secretion, nanobody spreading or kinetics, or any number of other specified biological functions. Teams should be conscious of the statistical relevance of their biological activity measurements and incorporate random error into their models, but with proper experimental design this issue would be minimized.
The lava lamp was super popular with the kids. We ran out of supplies at Boonshoft and COSI, even after we overstocked. They really enjoyed the final look of the lava lamps, and that they got to keep them. While they looked cool, it also taught them about the hydrophobic effect in chemistry. This is a valuable process that is really important to understand, so having exposure to it so young is so beneficial for their future learning. In the micropipette activity, they learned how to dilute a liquid and how to use a micropipette. These are high level skills that are on the college level, so getting to learn more about it early can really help promote deep understanding later on.
For future iGEM teams, having collaborations with the Wright State iGEM team for the second year in a row gives us an even stronger relationship for next year. Also, we performed experiments at Boonshoft and COSI again for the second year in a row, giving the future team a great foundation for human practices as both spaces told us they would welcome the team back. We also attended WestFest which we plan on revisiting next year which gives the future team even more opportunities to teach others about synthetic biology! This is key for future success, as it allows more time to find further connections.
Although our team did not have access to a lab space to perform our Wet-Lab projects, we still made sure to document our ideas and potential methods thoroughly. For example, we identified bacterial strains and plasmids that could be used to test secretion for potential therapeutic proteins. We also documented planned experiments that outlined procedures of all wet lab activites. Finally, we demonstrated how the engineering cycle could be implemented to our wet-lab process. These contributions will hopefully inspire future iGEM teams to continue research in this field.