Building the narrative
To fully grasp the importance of design on the performance of a team in the iGEM competition, it is important to understand that iGEM is essentially a storytelling competition. The narrative and presentation are oftentimes more important than the actual science conducted behind the scenes. This is a rather natural process now that the organisation is growing with more than 350 teams participating worldwide. Due to such abundance, judges only have up to thirty minutes to grasp the essence of your project. As project manager, I put this notion at the forefront when approaching experimental design, as well as the textual & visual presentation of our project.
Firstly, my team ensured that our experiments were iterative and augmentative, meaning that we had a core, which we would further support with additional layers through experiments. In the figure below you can see the structure of our main experiments, which is described in detail on the Engineering page of our wiki.
Iteration 1
The core in our case was the possibility to synthesise nanoparticles in the lab. Initially, we performed the synthesis chemically, using ascorbic acid as the reducing agent. This allowed us to use an optimisation model to establish the optimal ratio of gold:silver ions for obtaining nanoparticles that converted the most light at 800 nm into heat. The wavelength of 800 nm is optimal for PhotoThermal Therapy.
Iteration 2
2. Upon establishing the optimal gold:silver ratio with ascorbic acid, we proceeded to optimise the biological system. Firstly, we worked with wildtype (genetically unchanged) Escherichia coli bacteria to find the optimal growth medium for the production of ion-reducing agents.
Iterations 3 & 4
As the final contributions to the optimisation of the biological nanoparticle-producing platform we experimented with the addition of nitrate to the growth medium and overexpression of proteins that were hypothesised to contribute the most to nanoparticle formation and stabilisation. Finally, we conducted a second iteration of computational optimisation, which allowed us to predict the optimal chemical conditions (pH, Temperature, metal salts concentration) for the synthesis of nanoparticles.
Modeling Iteration 2
To leave a lasting impression from our project, we initially were aiming to “blow up” cells in an attempt to showcase our proof of concept. However, that quickly proved too ambitious (as did the project name TNT), and the redesign of the experiment led to an elegant way to showcase the ability of the biologically-synthesised nanoparticles to convert light into heat. The elegance impressed the judges, too, as we were nominated for the best measurement.
Case 1: A header, available on every page. It provides an overview of the page’s contents, along with a description of each section according to the subnavigation. This allows judges to decode the structure of the page at a glance, and simplifies information digging.
Case 2: Dropdowns contain additional information, clarifications, and tables of raw data. This allows for a deliberate in-depth dive, while keeping the essence at the foreground.
Case 3: Cards in each subsection further simplify the navigation process and information digging. Thanks to these cards, the judge becomes conscious of the intent of each section on every page.