Bronze


Competition Deliverables


  • We created a wiki with our team project;

  • We have put together a promotion video for our project;

  • We filled in the judging forms;

  • We made a video presentation.

Project Attributions


  • We have created an attribution page to thank all those who helped develop this project and explain how each one was able to contribute.

Contributions


  • Our project focused on the structural modeling, molecular docking and development of biological circuits capable of promoting the synthesis of multiple proteins from a single mRNA molecule, and we were able to design parts that are easy-to-use, modify and adapt for the creation of a CBD production platform based on synthetic biology;

  • We also contributed with analyses of the catalytic sites, cavities and molecular docking of the modeled proteins, building results that could help in studies of enzymatic behavior for the reactions we studied, and we also contributed to the characterization of the enzymes we studied via bioinformatics.

Silver


Engineering Success


  • We have successfully completed this by modeling, validating and simulating molecular dockings on the five enzymes of the metabolic pathway, developing and validating a strategy that made it possible to assemble biological circuits, by adding the genetic information from the needed enzymes and a self-cleaving sequence to appropriate plasmids, generating circuits that are simple and easy to work with. This criteria was achieved exclusively through dry-lab, as the wet-lab part will only be carried out next year, using the results generated this year for predictability and an improved workflow.

Human Practices


  • As a way of bringing our project closer to society, we publicized our project through our social networks and in common centers in our city. We also collected data on the population's knowledge of the medicinal use of cannabidiol, identified and battled misconceptions and spread education around both medicinal CBD and synthetic biology, and held and participated in events around education for high-schoolers and for women in engineering, since we are an engineering-oriented campus.

Gold


Excellence in Synthetic Biology


  • To achieve excellence in synthetic biology, we developed a robust modeling project, which gave us deep insights on the structure, function, interactions and possible modifications of the metabolic pathway enzymes. These heavy modeling and bioinformatics studies allowed us to construct optimized and balanced parts that are interchangeable, elegant, simple, and most importantly, allows us to obtain CBD via synthetic biology. In addition, we concentrated efforts on carrying out an education project around medicinal CBD, synthetic biology and inclusion.