Vision

We envisioned mösbi as a new approach to popularise synthetic biology – both within the scope of the iGEM competition and beyond. However, as most people who have dabbled with biology know, nothing in biology ever seems to work first time. In our case the time limitations imposed prevented us on developing mösbi to its full potential.

Here we share some thoughts on future steps that would have been taken in order to complete this part of the project and our vision for this new and exciting undertaking.

As you may have noted so far, mösbi is aimed at the people to give a larger-than-usual audience. The key message about mösbi remains its unorthodox accessibility. Accessibility in terms of requiring little or no scientific knowledge to use the product; accessibility in terms of its honest and open-source design so that everyone wishing to understand its working and willing to contribute may do so; accessibility in terms of creating an affordable and powerful analytic tool for everyone to use.

Education plays an important role in our vision. We see mösbi as a herald of the current post-genomic era – bringing current technological advances directly to people who may otherwise be unaffected or indifferent towards them. Bringing synthetic biology into the living room would allow us to educate people about this area of science: Its current status, its future and their role in it. It would allow us to communicate honestly about the benefits and risks associated with genetic engineering and synthetic biology. In addition, mösbi would represent something of a biological version of Arduino – an open-source platform to experiment and learn with, thus likely a popular choice for young science aficionados throughout primary and secondary education.

Although remaining open-source, some level of supervision over the future development of mösbi would be required. This should be carried out by a not-for-profit organisation which would keep researching new modules, reviewing user created ones and supervising the distribution of seed lines and paraphernalia required for mösbi assembly. This paraphernalia – i.e. antibiotic resistance plates, auxotroph nutrient supplemented soil, growth boxes like the one our team built could provide a partial source of income for further platform development and organisation running costs.

There is much more that would need to be done before mösbi could reach this level of impact. Firstly, output reporter genes especially chromoproteins, need to be optimised for expression in the new chassis. Development of auxotrophic lines of Marchantia represents another necessity. Tests with seed line crossing and possible framework optimisation would need to be carried out to ensure mösbi works as planned. Additional thought would need to be given about legal implications of such a product and carefully assessed. There is a large scope for improvement. The above listed undertakings will certainly become easier to achieve as the chassis develops through basic research in the upcoming years. We like to think iGEM has made and will keep making contributions on this front over the next decade.

To conclude, we hope that in a decade or so - when accessible, user-friendly biosensors are a reality, one will be able to look back on this effort and see it as a grain of sand in a larger picture that helped drive synthetic biology forward.