August 24st, 2023

Hala Mahdi & Mya George

Hey iGEMmers and everyone who is not currently rushing to wrap up lab work for the summer!

It’s time for another mGEM blog post, this time featuring another team from Ontario, Queen's iGEM, also known as QGEM!

This year, QGEM has been working hard to tackle the environmental concern that is plastic pollution. Their project focuses on engineering a gene circuit into a bacteria that allows the organism to convert polyethylene terephthalate (PET), a harmful plastic commonly found in disposable water bottles, into polyhydroxybutyrate (PHB), a type of bioplastic that is environmentally friendly. This is an incredible example of harnessing the power of synthetic biology to solve real-world problems, and we cannot wait to see them present their exciting project at the Grand Jamboree this year in Paris!

The incredible QGEM Outreach team!

Now onto the questions we asked them!

1. How has your team balanced the short-term nature (<1 year) of iGEM cycles with real-world impact when conceptualizing your project?

The Queen's iGEM team has echoed the challenges and pressure present with producing a high-quality project in a year, however, they feel that keeping their sight on the potential impact fuels their effort and determination throughout the process. The innovation and aspects of their design has huge potential, just as they have seen in other teams working on TPA degradation, PHB synthesis, and PET degradation which laid the groundwork for aspects of their current project. Their outreach initiatives, which include numerous education activities with youth, also contribute to their impact. When you come to look at everything that is achieved at the end of the season, it adds up to a lot!

This is exactly how we feel at mGEM as well. While we might not have a fully completed and validated project by the end of the iGEM cycle, you don’t have to have a perfectly polished project to make an impact! Outreach initiatives, especially those focusing on education and youth have great potential for widespread impact in introducing youth to these issues and inspiring them to be part of the solution as they begin their post-secondary journey. Additionally, oftentimes just presenting an idea that is well researched and tackles a significant issue can be a big push towards the solution, as progress in the scientific community is seldom made by individuals working in isolation. It truly takes a village to get to a breakthrough, and work that we have started as iGEM teams can spark inspiration in other research teams around the world (including other iGEM teams!) and lead them to continuing our research and building off of it!

1. What kind of challenges have your team worked to overcome as a student-led research team?

As students, Queen's shared, everyone can have extremely different schedules from classes to part-time jobs and co-op positions to personal commitments. Having an interdisciplinary team can make this even more challenging with students in different programs being more likely to have conflicting availabilities. For Queen's, this has made it feel harder to progress further consistently and different subteams alternate between actively working on iGEM tasks and having to prioritize other commitments. While the team has been able to make the best out of different schedules they hope to return to having work positions available in the summer for students or potentially integrating iGEM work into an existing course.

This is such a common experience for iGEM teams, considering the fact that while iGEM may seem like a regular extracurricular activity, it truly is so much more. The time, dedication, and effort that is required to see an iGEM project from project conception and development to the final Jamboree presentation is immense, and oftentimes requires sacrifices from team members that are difficult to make without fair compensation. Certain iGEM teams have the chance to provide work opportunities for students and compensate them financially for their work with iGEM - allowing them to give more time to iGEM without losing out on the opportunity to work in the summer as many post-secondary students do. For mGEM, providing paid opportunities this summer was a difficult feat, but we were able to provide an opportunity to incorporate iGEM work into a project course. This allowed one of our Wet-Lab Leads, Andrew, to work in the lab full time, while tailoring his project course topic to be an aspect of our iGEM project that we were planning on working on in the lab this summer. This way, he can at least earn course credits for his work with iGEM, and have the chance to work more closely with our PI and access resources typically only provided for students completing these types of courses.

1. How has having three subteams benefited the way in which you approach project development?

When we had a call with Queen's iGEM, their president Bryant brought up a point that I had not considered before–iGEM has sub-teams so that students can specialize in their specific interest and focus on learning more in that area. Personally, I have been focussed on the idea that sub-teams need to come together so much that I forgot that oftentimes people are drawn to specific aspects of an iGEM project. Further developing skill sets relevant to wet-lab, outreach, or dry-lab can be helpful for students working to develop their research and interpersonal skills. Queen's also cited their sub-team structure as being useful for managing tasks in smaller groups and ensuring that the team can ultimately accomplish all that they set out to do.

1. If each sub-team was an ingredient, what kind of dish could you make?

We hope that y’all like campfires because Queen's iGEM’s dish is a s’more! Wet-lab is the marshmallow, holding the team together as the project directly relies on their work and everything is layered and built around them as a whole. Dry-lab is then the chocolate, the much needed piece of dessert, helping with visualization of the project model and wiki development to communicate everything. Lastly, outreach is the graham crackers as they connect the project as a whole–providing support in terms of website development and connecting the project to community initiatives. We could not think of a better (nor sweeter) way to describe the team!

1. What are some strategies you implement to maintain mental wellness as both an iGEM team as well as individual university/college students?

Within a team, oftentimes the norms start with the student leadership. How they present themselves and how they approach getting work done. Queen’s feels that this is important for their team especially, having all leads focus on maintaining balance in their own lives and making sure to communicate prioritizing one’s mental wellness to all members as well. Their team hosts weekly check-ins for executives members that includes both technical updates and personal ones–ensuring that the team understands each other and works to maintain everyone’s well being.