Check out UBC Vancouver’s 2025 contributions to the iGEM community!
This season, UBC Vancouver strived to deliver meaningful contributions to the iGEM community through deliverables led across many subteams.
Our team went through multiple rounds of project brainstorming and explored diverse ideas before agreeing on meduCA. We were interested in picking a project that not only addressed a tangible issue here on Earth, but also looked ahead to the future of space exploration and research. meduCA stood out as it allowed us to tackle a pressing local challenge within British Columbia’s Mining and Mineral Extraction industry while simultaneously developing sustainable biocementation solutions for extraterrestrial construction. This dual application captured our team’s vision to use Synthetic Biology as a bridge between local bioremediation and space innovation. By combining environment responsibility with our passion for exploration, meduCA became the clear choice for an impactful and imaginative iGEM project this season.
Our team’s contributions are documented in detail throughout the team Wiki and are highlighted below!
Wet Lab
Contributions to the Registry of Standard Biological Parts
To learn more about the Caulobacter crescentus and Synechoccus elongatus parts contributed by our team this season, navigate to our Bronze Medal: Contributions page where each part links back to its home on the Registry!
Carbonic Anhydrase Depletion Assay
To validate our engineered strains, we developed a series of assays to demonstrate functional protein display, enzymatic activity and MICP efficiency. In our future work we plan to carry out these experiments and optimize these assays for maximal performance.
All protocols designed and adapted by our wet lab team have also been made available on our page to allow for future use by other teams.
Dry Lab
Open Source Software
maestro, our framework for defining and distributing informatics workflows; miso, our software for designing hardware user interfaces; and dagger, our package for semantics-based parallelism, are all available on GitLab for other iGEM teams to use.
Hardware
This season, our hardware team was dedicated to developing 3 bioreactors for accelerated cell culturing: each specialized for different growth conditions. These bioreactors were designed and built in-house and were designed to regulate conditions such as temperature, pH, agitation and aeration. On the Earth side, the CB2A bioreactor was made custom for growing the Caulobacter crescentus CB2A strain. On the Space side, 2 bioreactors were designed. The first is a UTEX growth bioreactor which provides light energy, water and CO₂ in order to optimize growth conditions of the Synechococcus elongatus UTEX 2973 strain. And the second is designed for the same organism, but focuses on simulating low gravity conditions to further inform the implementation of meduCA into the real world.
All Design History Files (DHF) are accessible on our team Wiki alongside further documentation corresponding to each bioreactor on their respective pages: CB2A DHF, UTEX DHF, Low-Gravity DHF.
iGEM teams can also refer to our CAD design files for the bioreactor and bioprinter parts, made publicly available on our iGEM gitlab!
Human Practices
Inclusivity
Musculoskeletal (MSK) Inclusive Lab Tool
Our inclusivity team spent the season engaging with a stakeholder to design an MSK tool which aims to reduce wrist strain correlated to pipetting in the lab. This tool was subject to an iterative design approach where it was adjusted and tested in accordance with our stakeholder’s needs, helping us achieve our goal of making academia and research more inclusive for all.
By making our process available on our wiki and our CAD files open-source, we demonstrate a framework for inclusive design projects that can be used to inspire future iGEM teams: start with one person, learn deeply from their experience, and build outward to serve a wider, more diverse community. To refer to our MSK tool CAD design files, head over to our repository on the iGEM gitlab!
Education & Design
Children’s Storybook
This season, our Education and Design teams worked together to produce a brand new children’s storybook, Synbio with Kaia and Eliana: From Seeds to Stars. This storybook encompassed a range of topics resonating with meduCA’s main themes including space exploration, synthetic biology and scientific thinking. We designed the book to help young readers and their families think about sustainability and learn how synthetic biology can solve real problems, both on our planet and beyond. Our Synthetic Biology Children’s Storybook page walks you through the design process of the book which can be found here as another contribution to the greater synbio community!
Design & Wiki
Tutorial Videos
Since our team has designed many custom technologies to support meduCA as a biocementation platform, our Dry Lab and Design teams have prepared a set of tutorial videos to walk users through our work in an engaging, easy-to-follow manner. We have contributed these videos to the iGEM Video Universe and hope that iGEMers and researchers find these guides informative.
For our custom bioreactors, we produced a how-to-use video tutorial that takes viewers step-by-step through the setup and operation. In conjunction with the design history files provided, users will be able to replicate our work through engaging, closed-captioned video and text. It covers the process from sterilization to part-by-part assembly as well as clean-up. The bioink also has a specialized tutorial video that takes viewers through our bioink production. Each part of the bioink is carefully added and its purpose in the mixture is explained. This helps viewers understand what may be causing issues if they arise or make necessary changes based on their needs or applications. The video also shows how the handmade bricks were extruded from a syringe and how to successfully crosslink it and solidify it.
Notion Exporter
Our team previously relied on GitHub-based workflows and manual Markdown formatting to manage and collaborate on project content. While functional, this approach introduced friction in writing, styling, and maintaining documentation, ultimately limiting collaboration and increasing the overhead of keeping content up to date. To address this, we developed the Notion Exporter: a tool that converts content directly from our internal Notion workspace into clean, formatted Markdown files, ready to be hosted and displayed on the project wiki. This enabled us to fully adopt Notion as our team’s central platform for planning, writing, and organizing content, while maintaining complete compatibility with the iGEM wiki ecosystem.
We made the Notion Exporter publicly available on GitLab so that other iGEM teams may adopt or build upon it to suit their specific project needs. We hope this provides the necessary foundation for teams to fully leverage a Notion-based workflow.
Learn more about UBC Vancouver’s contributions on their respective deliverable pages using the drop-down navigation bar!
