Our team actively engaged with stakeholders related to mental health, sustainability, and synthetic biology, including biochemists, cellular biologists and educators. Their feedback helped us improve both our scientific approach and social impact goals and strengthen our proposal. Specifically, the summer before the conference we discussed via online meetings with a past iGEM mentor, Dr. Ioannis Vizirianakis, and a Molecular and Cellular biology expert, Dr. Felichi Mae Arines.

For instance, educators emphasized the importance of accessibility and safety in implementing such stress-relief mechanisms, while scientists guided us toward techniques and materials that we could use that would be effective, but at the same time promote sustainability and create a positive impact on the environment. Their advice also enlightened us to emphasize inclusivity in our educational materials and focus on the long-term impact of our solution to our community, so that others can also build upon it.

These interactions ensured that our project directly contributed to SDG 3 (Good Health and Well-Being) and SDG 12 (Responsible Consumption and Production) through safe, sustainable, as well as socially and environmentally relevant biotechnology techniques.

In the context of social sustainability, our solution provides an effective, inclusive and affordable tool for reducing stress that can be adopted especially by schools and community groups without the need for heavy infrastructure.

Regarding environmental sustainability, our solution promotes sustainable practices by using yeast-based biotechnology, which therefore reduces agricultural strain, water waste and land consumption. It also promotes economical sustainability since our proposal enables scalable, low-cost production of natural anxiety-relief mechanisms that could be integrated in the wellness or even education sectors because of the stress that students undergo during exam periods.

SDG 3 — Good Health and Well-Being

Our team’s vision primarily supports SDG 3 by addressing the growing mental health crisis through an accessible, biologically supported bioengineered indoor diffuser using genetically modified yeast. We provide a natural alternative to chemical anxiolytics, aiming to reduce dependence on pharmaceuticals by integrating synthetic biology and genetic engineering techniques to promote preventive mental wellness.

SDG 4 — Quality Education

Our human practices department, along with all members individually, have contributed to supporting SDG 4 through outreach to professionals and education initiatives open to the broader community. This included synthetic biology workshops, elementary school activities, the Researcher’s Night event, our presence at the annual ACSTAC conference, and our school’s Christmas Bazaar.

Over 500 participants overall passed through our booths in these events, sparking dialogue regarding their experiences around stress issues in the educational sector. These initiatives demonstrated our commitment to transferring our knowledge to potential future iGEMers. We developed interactive simulations and presentations that showed how synthetic biology, biotechnology and mental health science can impact our environment, fostering curiosity and understanding among participants.

SDG 9 — Industry, Innovation, and Infrastructure

Our project promotes SDG 9 by demonstrating how biotechnology and gene-editing can be applied in an innovative way to develop scalable mental health products. We use synthetic biology to engineer a yeast-based product, fostering innovation in biotechnology as well as sustainable laboratory solutions. This aligns with modern manufacturing systems focused on sustainable biomanufacturing.

SDG 12 — Responsible Consumption and Production

By implementing our solution through biosynthetic yeast production instead of direct plant extraction, we advance SDG 12. This reduces the environmental impact of large-scale lavender cultivation, including land use, water consumption and pesticide application. Our method demonstrates how biotechnology can serve as an effective alternative to traditional production processes, supporting circular economy principles by keeping resources in use, reducing waste, and replacing a resource-intensive process with a renewable one.

SDG 13 — Climate Action

By lowering the environmental footprint associated with traditional agricultural essential oil production, our project contributes to SDG 13. Using yeast and sustainable materials for eco-friendly diffusion reduces reliance on resource-intensive agriculture and chemical production.

Potentially harmful interactions were also carefully examined, including the environmental dangers of large-scale processing and ethical issues surrounding genetic modification. We addressed these through open communication with mentors and community members, and by setting strict biosafety procedures approved by the competition.

In our Wiki’s Sustainability page, we have included all of our project outcomes and reflections based on specific SDGs. Each activity, either educational or laboratory-based, is backed up with evidence such as photos, articles, posters, and social media posts, along with carefully designed action plans.

All information, mentoring insights, and post-activity reflections are published on our open-access Wiki page and our MAVericksss social media account so that other teams can build upon or even improve our approach to biotechnology, sustainability-driven initiatives, or mental health-oriented solutions.