Mr. Filipenko informed us that working with an Indigenous community partner needs to be built on a trusting relationship, which means that communication needs to start well in advance of any research or project work beginning. He gave an example timeline of one year for relationship building, which is the length of a iGEM project. As well, he noted that due to the uncertainty of whether this project will continue post iGEM 2025 season, then it is unlikely that a community will see a complete final product that they can then use to benefit their community.

Our conversation aimed to cover the environmental and societal impacts of our project. By increasing our understanding of current methods, we are able to better understand how our project can contribute towards current sustainable development goals. Ultimately, our conversation highlighted the importance of weighing costs against benefits.

We met with Harley Green, an associate scientist from Pioneer Labs, a non-profit startup engineering microbes for Mars. Harley’s research background is in synthetic biology and is a biomanufacturing scientist. Our wet lab team wanted to inquired about the feasibility of the mars engineering aspect of meduCA, and we wanted to know their ethical considerations of their project. We were most curious if there were environmental concerns regarding Martian exploration.

Dr. Zaidi said that Quran is always encouraging the exploration of the universe, that God has given the gift of research and academic understanding, and that humanity should use this to benefit and contribute towards society. The biggest point that was stressed is that our project must focus on the benefit of humanity and should not cause harm. Although our intention is positive, Dr. Zaidi recognizes that we cannot control how others may perceive our research. If others build on our research it is important to note that it can be out of our control if others use our knowledge for negative intentions. He also emphasized that he hopes our research can benefit other areas of humanity such as food resources, medical research, or infrastructure resources. He also noted that space exploration shouldn’t be used as an attempt to leave earthly issues behind and escape God’s judgement. He specified that this project should be used to improve our access to resources for the benefit of humanity. Through this conversation, we knew we much ensure our project doesn’t aim to leave Earth behind in our space exploration.

Patrik is an all-around cyanobacteria expert and was instrumental in the cyanobacterial component of our project throughout our multiple interviews and informal meetings with him. Patrik kindly provided us with a starter culture of UTEX, 1000X stocks of BG-11 medium components, and trained us on the nuances of cultivating and engineering cyanobacteria, such as using Gellan Gum (Phytagel) in place of agar for solid medium for increased light penetration. He, along with Kalen Dofher, gave us the recommendation to pursue homologous recombination as our main engineering strategy to take advantage of cyanobacteria’s natural DNA repair ability, and gave feedback on our construct designs.

Kalen was another valuable point of contact for engineering cyanobacteria. In particular, he had extensive experience engineering non-model cyanobacteria by electroporation. In addition to helping us with ideating the cyanobacterial component of our project with Patrik, he shared with us valuable information on the best practices and quirks of electroporation, designing constructs for homologous recombination, and general molecular cloning. He showed us the lab tradition of wearing a Viking hat when electroporating for successful transfection.

Leah had given feedback regularly throughout our project, and was our main point of contact regarding conjugation. She reminded us to include a basis of mobility (bom) or oriT in our constructs so that we may use conjugation as a backup transfection strategy. She helped us to evaluate whether regular cloning strains of <i>E. coli</i> would be suitable as cargo and helper strains in triparental mating, and shared tips from her experience with conjugation.

From the start of the 2025 season, Beth has been an integral expert in the planning and execution of meduCA. She was an integral part of our cloning progress, providing experimental materials and close guidance throughout the season. As a professional in <i>Caulobacter crescentus </i>experimental techniques, she has provided feedback and technical troubleshooting assistance for <i>C. crescentus </i>growth, cloning and transformation. She recommended restoring the native <i>RsaA</i> promoter in our expression vectors and helped us develop a strategy for validating successful fusion expression, stability and function.

We reached out to Ryan McLaughlin for technical guidance on TreeSAPP. He helped us and explained how to construct a bacterial alpha-carbonic anhydrase (COG3338) reference package with  `treesapp create` , providing a non-redundant and quality-controlled dataset for downstream TreeSAPP workflows. He clarified how to generate high-quality reference phylogenies and visualize clade-specific features in a way that would support downstream interpretation. Additionally, Ryan assisted us with metadata integration, showing how to link functional and taxonomic information into the phylogenetic framework.

Julia Anstett is enrolled in the Genome Sciences and Technology program as a PhD candidate. Her work focuses on metagenomics, single-cell genomics, and genome quality in the context of the microbial ecology of anoxic marine settings. Julia helped us understand the functionality of TreeSAPP evaluate and how to interpret the output results from evaluate. She also guided us on further implementation of TreeSAPP where inaccurate nodes could be removed for a better representation of the phylogenetic tree.

Beth inspired the approach to investigate cell surface display. Her previous work modelling fusion proteins using AlphaFold were consulted prior to beginning this project. The methodology of PyMol usage for complex visualization, graphical display and assessment of RMSD value was inspired by Beth. She clarified concepts and answered questions about protein fold rate.

John helped us with our CB2A Bioreactor design and gave us feedback on our completed mark 2. He helped provide insights into how our bioreactors could be better tuned for space use and exploration. His insights also helped us plan our future steps, addressing potential issues in our future projects like biofilm formation.

With a background in algal cultivation, bioreactor optimization, and biofuel research, Matt shared guidance for the UBC iGEM Dry and Wet Lab team working on cyanobacterial cultivation. His suggestions included reducing bubble volume with autoclavable disposable spargers to improve gas transfer efficiency, measuring optical density at 680 nm to track chlorophyll content rather than relying solely on 750 nm turbidity estimates, and using baffled flasks or vessel baffles to enhance mixing and CO₂ diffusion. He also provided feedback on lighting, recommending that they consider LED strip configurations suitable for different stages, top-down illumination for flask cultures, and flat-panel, backlit designs for later prototyping.

Kalen was our main point of contact for learning about and incorporating the automated and high-throughput lighting system into optimizing media compositions. We met with Kalen to discuss workflows for BG-11 media optimization, including using JMP and design of experiments to determine experimental conditions. We learned how to create a picklist and a COMBI file, which is a spreadsheet of volumes that we can tell an automated liquid handler to dispense over 300 different media compositions in a 384 well-plate

Dr. Nicholas Lin has experience developing bioinks incorporating mycelium. Thus, we approached Dr. Lin and had multiple meetings and training on how to optimize and test bioinks. Dr. Lin advised us on how to calculate components needed based on w/v% and demonstrated how he prepared his bioink composed of carboxymethylcellulose (CMC), cornstarch, and agar powder. He suggested that to optimize the bioink composition, the two main goals are that the gel is able to 1) extrude through nozzle and 2) layers are able to build on each other. This motivated our methodology above in seeing what the maximum weight % of sand and/or particle size is for smooth extrusion.

Taehyun Kim has previously worked at Aspect Biosystems, a biotechnology company that develops bioprinted tissue therapeutics. He has worked on testing and validating biomaterials, such as alginate-based hydrogels with Aspect Biosystem’s 3D bioprinters. Thus, we talked to Taehyun about various aspects about our bioink composition and the development of our 3D bioprinter. He advised on the importance of having a minimum viable product to demonstrate the functionality of our bioink in forming biocemented bricks. Thus, we proceeded with incorporating commercial carbonic anhydrase in our MGS-1 alginate gels as a potential positive control and minimum viable product.

Harley Greene is a synthetic biologist and associate scientist at Pioneer Labs, a non-profit startup aiming to engineer microbes for terraforming Mars. Harley has experience in developing a soluble Mars Regolith media recipe to culture their microbes and using IC50 as a measurement for assessing the growth of their engineered strains in such media. Thus, we asked Harley why might he think is the cause for the alginate gel to not crosslink with MGS-1. He suggested that since MGS-1 is meant to simulate the physical properties of Martian Regolith, it may not simulate 100% the chemical properties, and thus, a chemical issue, such as calcium oxide, may be playing a role in reducing cross-linking. Furthermore, Harley advised that the biggest factor in allowing the microbe to survive and grow in our bioink would be nutrient availability. This includes the source of nitrogen, phosphorus, carbon, and also having the media at a right pH.

Fatemah is a PhD student in Applied Mathematics at UBC, specializing in mathematical biology, with an undergraduate background in Mechanical Engineering. We consulted her to validate our diffusion modeling approach for the sand–alginate system, clarify numerical methods for solving differential equations, and guide our application of finite element analysis to simulate crosslinking behavior.

We consulted Professor Michele Marino, Associate Professor in the Department of Civil Engineering and Computer Science Engineering at the University of Rome Tor Vegata, and a recognized expert in chemo mechanical modelling and hydrogel simulation. As a co-author of our reference paper, he helped us interpret the model, clarify key assumptions, and adapt it to bioink crosslinking with sand particles. He recommended adjusting parameters such as diffusion coefficients to better reflect the behaviour of our ink samples.

Tony was extremely interested in dagger’s implications on building more robustly parallelized software. He reviewed an iteration of dagger’s implementation, and provided technical suggestions on how it could be further optimized.

Upon learning about dagger’s “execute as a DAG” mentality, Ryan immediately noted that leveraging this library for defining bioinformatics workflows would be a logical next step. He indicated that expressing parallelism via the flow of data is a highly intuitive paradigm.

Dr. Wong provided an end-user perspective toward miso’s interface design. He noted that he appreciates the simple and intuitive web interface provided by miso, and the real-time sensor visualization is particularly helpful to quickly gain context on environmental readings. Additionally, he provided guidance on potential future UI improvements such as a GUI-based hardware declaration interface.

Dr. Wong, who is familiar with bioinformatic workflows primarily from a biological perspective, observed that interacting with job schedulers poses a major challenge for novice bioinformaticians attempting to run complex computational workflows. He noted that maestro’s design — allowing workflows to be written independent of a specific executor and enabling execution environments to be configured through a config file — could significantly improve the accessibility of bioinformatics.

Ryan has extensively leveraged existing workflow execution tools — notably Nextflow — in his research and work. He believes that maestro presents some advantages over these current top of the line tools, most notably due to maestro’s compile-time script validation and configuration mechanism.

By conducting an Integrated Human Practices (iHP) interview with Tanya Kyi, we strengthened our storybook framework by tackling complex scientific concepts and presented them in a suitable yet appealing format for young readers.

We sought feedback from Shar and improved the representation of various scientific concepts in our storybook, including simplifying complex vocabulary and improving readability in relevant areas.

Upon meeting with Mr. Bumbulovic, we shared with him the need for a lightweight add-on according to our user interview and shared our ideas about using a lightweight foam. Our only concern was our potential inability to sterilize the foam, to which he highlighted the use of polyurethane. Polyurethane is known to be lightweight, affordable, environment-friendly, and yet both durable and versatile according to further research that we then did. There are also many types, allowing us to choose what works best for our user.

To broaden the scope of our pipette, we conversed with Dr. Backman about how arthritis pain and discomfort can be alleviated through ergonomics. Dr. Catherine Backman is an occupational therapist and has served as the President of the Association of Rheumatology Health Professionals. She has worked with arthritic patients for many years, bridging her experiences with respect to these patients to occupational interventions; something we hope to do through our inclusive lab design project. We hoped to gain insight into the medicine behind arthritis which, in return, enables us to consciously design our pipette add-on such that it addresses a larger demographic of musculoskeletal disorders. But it was also important for us to understand the psychosocial aspect of arthritis and address our gaps in knowledge after having done some preliminary research.

The next step being 3D design and prototyping in the engineering “Design and Test” phase, we wanted to understand what software and testing methods to employ. We had with Dr. Pawel Kudzia, a former faculty researcher at UBC and researches engineering interventions in biomechanics, gave us contrasting insight. Interestingly, this was opposite to a previous suggestion by our co-PI, Dr. Jenna Usprech, who suggested to make precise C-sketches and then move onto 3D design. Considering that we hoped to create a pipette add-on to assist the pipette use of individuals with musculoskeletal disorders, his insight into how we could go about making movement-oriented designs was immensely helpful.

Our user is an undergraduate student occupied in wet lab work. She has experienced temporary paralysis in her wrist due to repetitive tasks, the nature of which are far more ordinary than expected. In light of her indulgence in extensive writing for literature class and baking, her wrist was inevitably under stress and eventually became paralyzed. After resting for a period of time, her wrist healed; however, painful, numbing and tingly sensations still recur when she performs certain straining tasks, especially within the lab. Her story is invaluable in showing that musculoskeletal disorders can rise upon anyone, and we need to be prepared to support the professional and personal goals of individuals occupied in wet lab who face these physical barriers.

After this meeting, we had a confirmed set of requirements with which we could now begin making our designs. Based on our user’s description of how each design addressed her needs, we were able to make more detailed CADs on Onshape. It also helped us understand the overlap between arthritis and our users situation, and how the common needs of both MSK groups can be used to create a more inclusive design. As our next steps, we needed to create and print multiple designs.

In this meeting, we met with our user to make measurements of the curvature and roundness of the add-on and rate her comfort for each to pinpoint the optimal thickness and roundness for finalized 3D modeling. As well, we also wanted to measure how long the wrist extension (Design E) needs to be for her to feel comfortable/supported.

We met with our user having printed all of our different design iterations, hoping to get feedback on the different sizes between marks. We had her hold the smaller and larger sizes without a pipette and comment on her thoughts on the different prints. Without a pipette she preferred the smaller print since her hand was in a more relaxed and natural position. She felt that the thicker prints stretched her hand out more which required her to use a stronger grip. Because of this, her wrist, both her wrist radius and wrist’s ulna, felt more uncomfortable. She also commented on the fact that the material was slippery, which fits with our previous idea of having grooves or bumps on the tool to improve grip. The material still worked for her, but she would have preferred something that was slightly more compressible, but not too much. She stated that the clay she previously held would be the perfect balance between structure and softness. We also wanted her to test the tool with the pipette, however it is important to note that only one print actually fit onto the pipette, which was the thickest size. When we had her test the tool with the pipette, she stated that although she preferred a thinner tool, the thick tool lowered the amount of grip she felt she used, and she preferred the tool over not using it.<b> </b>In the videos below, palmaris longus muscles (the two visible tendons on the inner part of your wrist), is visibly less activated while using the tool.