Summary

We have used our Policy & Practices approach to get a better understanding of what factors and principles govern the coordination of a system, specifically relating to the division of labour among its individual components. It is not enough to just think about the BioBricks and the new neat little tricks that you can introduce into specific bacterial strains. We think it is important to look at the bigger picture, and Policy & Practices gave us an opportunity to do exactly that!

We wanted to ensure that we knew why we were introducing metabolic wiring to iGEM and how we could see a benefit from this. We started off with general background reading about division of labour in systems, which made us see parallels between them and our very own system - iGEM. We therefore decided to exploit this advantage and proceeded to specifically design a strategy for evaluating division of labour in iGEM teams. We identified the following topics: Specialisation, Communication, Robustness, Hierarchy and Supervision. We interviewed other iGEM teams about these, and we then considered them in the context of our own biological system.

Hence, our Policy & Practices approach helped shape our project in multiple aspects. First of all the self-reflection and discourse with other teams made us more aware of team dynamics that take place in iGEM. We think that defining the recurring themes and common pitfalls can be valuable throughout the course of a project but also potentially serve as a guideline for future teams. We did, however, take our findings further rather than looking at it just from a social point of view. We think that if we could find the parallels between existing natural system and iGEM systems we can use our findings to influence the further design of our synthetic bacterial system. Linking back the common themes to bacterial populations, will give us a frame or starting point to work with once the basic biobrick components have been finalised. Our Policy & Practices approach will have provided the substrate for bringing together isolated scientific manipulations and shape them for a particular aim.

Evaluation of our approach

Did it answer our question?

Through the interviews with the iGEM teams, we verified many of the findings from literature and our own ideas, and we also found out new aspects we had not previously thought about. We realised for instance that we can ensure robustness of our system by introducing redundancy of functional tasks. All this together guided us towards the final picture, and helped us draw our conclusions. We now feel much more informed about the benefits of division of labour in the system; and we feel that, should we ever get to developing our own systems, we will be much more confident in planning these.

How did it influence the team’s project?

Even though our descriptions are very nice and clear and linear, in fact the development of our Policy & Practices and our scientific project was a circular (or rather, a doubly helical) process -- each component mutually influenced each other. The motivations of our Policy & Practices were directly derived from the motivations of our scientific project idea; the final design of the scientific project, however, was continuously shaped by the findings of the Policy & Practices. By exploring further into modular, specialised systems and their design, we realised that, if we wanted our scientific tool, the Metabolic Wiring, to form a part of a successful system, our work needed to include some crucial components. Hence, we have developed degrons, to act as a monitoring device in our system; and we have designed our population control system in correlation with the findings of Policy & Practices. Furthermore, our project allows plenty of room for further development, with great potential for future practical applications; we believe that the future of our project/system can also be shaped, at least to some degree, by our Policy & Practices work.

How might it be adapted for others to use?

We have worked on generalising our findings so that, with a little extra modification, they can be usefully applied to a wide variety of systems. One aspect, of course, is development of other bacterial systems that may be very different from ours; from all the research we have done, we believe that our findings could be relevant. But, equally importantly, these findings might be useful for future iGEM teams to adapt in their own project work. We only talked to 6 teams, and already we saw some patterns emerging about things that worked very well or, vice versa, didn’t work at all. Imagine what we could be achieved by doing a much wider study and talking to many and more iGEM teams from all around the world… We might even one day be able to build a perfect, flawless iGEM team! Now wouldn’t that be nice?