Our team has contributed following work to patients with endometriosis, students and future iGEM teams.
Through conducting the survey we were able to get a voice to many of the unheard females suffering from endometriosis in Switzerland and to understand their concerns, feelings and worries. With the gained information we started spreading awareness through our patients project, writing several articles for newspapers, our instagram platform and contributing to wikipedia.
During the course of our project we started a lunch lecture series which will be continued and taken over by one of our partner associations: the Student Biolab, in collaboration with future UZurich iGEM teams. Through the lunch lectures, our exhibition and our social media campaign we reached hundreds of people and informed them about the field of synthetic biology and endometriosis.
By organising workshops with high school students we hope to plant the seeds of inspiration for the next generation.
iGEM has never been as well known in Zurich as it is now. Multiple times team members were spoken to by strangers with: “You're the endometriosis guys, right?” We've built relationships with academics, companies and sponsors that future UZurich teams will profit from, now that iGEM is a household name at UZH and ETH.
Our team was able to contribute to the iGEM registry with many new basic and composite parts. The designed lactate dehydrogenase from Streptococcus bovis can be used to efficiently the environment. We provide constructs to efficiently block the pyruvate formate-lyase 1-activating enzyme, formate acetyltransferase 1 and bifunctional aldehyde-alcohol dehydrogenase which all use pyruvate as an substrate and play an important role in central metabolism, making them of interest to future projects. Furthermore we improved the LasB promoter (Part:BBa_R0079).