The Beginning
This year’s Valentine’s Day was something more than roses and postcards for a group of 15 young aspiring students from Duesseldorf. It was the day that marked the first big milestone of their journey — finding and cementing the vector of development for this year’s iGEM project. By a lucky coincidence, the team described is also the team that I am a part of and I would like to share with you, dear reader, the creative process our team went through.
First of all, to make it clear, this wasn’t one of those Eureka moments that suddenly occur and lead the person to glory. No, sir! If you ever asked someone how hard it is to come up with an idea for a startup, the person would definitely tell you it’s hard. Really, really hard. Now, imagine it in the context of the most progressive field in modern science, where every new technology from today is exploited tomorrow and thousands of new papers about it follow the day after. Should give you a perspective. Countless hours spent meditating, brainstorming, and polishing the project proposals lead us to this point. A whole three rounds of giving suggestions and voting, and voting and giving suggestions were needed to narrow it down to one. Trinity.
Trinity is a cool name and stuff (and we are very well aware of that), but what does the project comprise of? Well, glad you asked! Short answer — wait till September and see for yourself, but that would make you miss the most interesting part. Long answer — the project has a history, and I’m sure going to tell it! It may sound unlikely, but it all started with a house. Yes, the brainstorming yielded original ideas. No, this wasn’t one of them. It was just one of those bioactive houses, where you recycle everything you produce and produce everything from what you recycle. Admittedly, we felt uncomfortable beating a dead horse, so we introduced some interesting ideas like producing medical substances from household waste plastics, but all of it didn’t quite cut it. At this point, we figured that all the features that we wanted to introduce would have to be delegated to some form of a synthetic co-culture, in order to make it more autonomous and self-sufficient. So, why not concentrate on that?
Well, that’s exactly what we did. While most details are enterprise secrets (or simply not fully researched yet), we decided that there can be no project more synthetic than one focusing on co-cultivating of organisms, where all the parts are engineered with the help of rational design. After we presented our draft version of a complex three-way co-culture (hence the name) that would be the proof of principle for the system we want to establish, our team unanimously voted in favor of Trinity.
The concepts that didn’t make it also included bright thoughts like bioimplants or RNA-based diagnostic tools, but our team is now united in our vision of the product we want to present in Boston and a concentrated effort is being collectively performed right now in order for iGEM Duesseldorf 2018 to be competitive and successful!
