Bronze Medal Requirements

✓ Register the team
✓ Plan to attend and present at the iGEM 2014 Giant Jamboree
✓ Complete the iGEM Judging Form
✓ Complete and share the project and parts via the Wiki and the BioBrick Registry
✓ Include an acknowledgements page on your wiki
✓ Document one new standard BioBrick Part and submit it to the registry

Silver Medal Requirements

✓ Experimentally validate that the BioBrick submitted works as expected
✓ Document the characterization of this part on its Registry entry
✓ Articulate at least one "beyond the bench" question encountered by your team and how you considered and dealt with the(se) issue(s)

Beyond the Bench: Safety and Intellectual Property

CSU iGEM recognizes that when produces agricultural products or coming in contact with food products, there is a healthy amount of concern regarding genetic modification. Thus, via the advice of our faculty members, we added a safety mechanism to our project, called KillerRed, which you can see a description for on the Kill Switch Project page. This will prevent a laboratory strain from existing outside of the correct setting or affecting any natural environments. More on our safety concerns can be found on our Safety page.

Additionally, intellectual property in research is an extremely important topic. We discussed how to protect and best make decisions regarding the intellectual property we developed through the 2014 iGEM competition with a representative from our Intellectual Property Administrative Department, CSU Ventures. We have discussed how the University files provisional and full patents, including restrictions on disclosure, timelines of patents, and costs. We also discussed how the funding from projects which can be licensed comes back to the inventors, our departments, and the university as a whole. This has greatly informed our ability to keep in mind how and when to disclose information and how or whether to protect our IP before disclosing.