Hardware Projects

iGEM 2013 Bioremediation Projects

In the iGEM competition, we encourage teams to be creative, work hard and build cool things. While most teams choose to build biological systems that meet requirements for our part and project evaluations, some teams take that further and build hardware. This can be anything from simple, low cost lab equipment to new sensors, bioreactors and microfluidics systems.

This page will show some of the teams who worked on hardware projects in 2013.

Cornell 2013: Organofoam: Genetically Engineering Fungal Mycelium for Biomaterials Development

Manufacturing Track

Best Human Practices Advance Winner, World Championship Jamboree, Overgrad Section

Abstract: The goal of Organofoam is to develop a fundamental toolkit of genetic parts for engineering complex fungi, particularly plant-pathogenic basidiomycetes. We were inspired to do so by a local company, Ecovative Design, that uses lignin-degrading fungi and plant matter to produce a biodegradable Styrofoam substitute. The existing product that we are seeking to improve, known as “mushroom packaging,” is a sustainable and necessary alternative to Styrofoam. Polystyrene can take hundreds of years to degrade in landfills, produces dozens of identified chemical toxins upon combustion, and is tremendously inefficient to recycle, thus posing difficulties for disposal and polluting the environment. However, the production efficiency of Ecovative’s substitute suffers due to contamination from pathogenic molds, a problem that we seek to solve using synthetic biology. Using the complex, plant-pathogenic basidiomycete, Ganoderma lucidum, as a chassis, we are expanding the accessibility of fungal genetic engineering and demonstrating its utility for commercial purposes.