To help demonstrate our team’s achievements to the judges, we put together a judging summary page to guide you to each deliverable!
Bronze Medal
1. Competition Deliverables
Over the past 10 season, the UBC Vancouver iGEM team spent countless days and nights working on meduCA for the world renowned 2025 iGEM Jamboree. To communicate this work the judges and greater iGEMer community, we ensured that all the following competition deliverables were complete:
Team wiki
Presentation Video
Judging Form
Judging session
2. Project Attributions
Throughout the season, our members and executive team ensured to track all individual contributions made towards meduCA. Details of each member’s work can be found on our team’s AttributionsPage. We have also documented and are proud to display the generous External Contributionsfrom all advisors, sponsors, faculty, integrated human practices experts and every other contributor who helped meduCA come to life this competition season.
3. Contribution
This year, UBC Vancouver’s Wet Lab, Dry Lab, Human Practices, and Administration subteams produced meaningful contributions which we are excited to share with other iGEMers and scientists world wide. Details of these items can be found on our team’s Contributionpage.
Silver Medal
1. Engineering Success
To ensure that we are iterating on our work and driving our science forward, our team made a great effort to run through many versions of the Engineering Design Cycle. These DBTL cycles are documented in many places across our wiki as they were integrated into our Wet Lab, Dry Lab and Human Practices efforts this year. A summary of these cycles can be found on our Engineeringpage, highlighting the experimentation and troubleshooting that contributed to the optimization of meduCA.
2. Human Practices
Within our community, the UBC Vancouver team spent time reviewing the social and ethical impacts of our work through stakeholder interviews, expert conversations, and two-way dialogue with various communities encompassing children, students, academic & industry experts and more. Our Human Practices work and interview details can found scattered throughout our wiki as well as on our Human Practicespage highlighting the key interactions which drove meduCA forward.
Gold Medal
1. Excellence in Synthetic Biology
To achieve the Gold Medal Criteria of Excellence in Synthetic Biology for the 2025 iGEM Jamboree, our team carefully selected 3 special prizes from both the General Biological Engineering and Specialization categories.
Our new composite part, BBa_25EMPHCH, has been submitted to the iGEM Registry of Standard Biological Parts for use by future iGEMers and Synthetic Biologists.
This composite part integrates into meduCA’s Earth application as it enables surface display of Carbonic Anhydrase (CA) in the Caulobacter crescentus strain: CB2A.
Our part encodes for a fusion protein, RsaA-BtCAII, which can be surface displayed on Caulobacter crescentus CB2A JS4038. This fusion protein functions under the native RsaA promoter in wild type cells, and this design allowed us to integrate a variety of CAs in the middle of the RsaA to enable stable expression and anchoring of the enzyme on the cell’s outer membrane.
Our team ensured that our registry documentation is thorough and detailed, including an overview of PrsaA constitutive promoter+RsaA-BtCAII’s functionality and usage as well as our characterization results including cloning and proof of function experiments. Scientific figures and graphics were incorporated throughout the documentation to aid in knowledge transfer, ensuring that our part page enriches the registry and allows for clear knowledge transfer to future users.
Overall, our new composite part provides a versatile, modular platform for surface protein engineering in Caulobacter crescentus, advancing meduCA’s Earth application while equipping future teams with a robust tool for enzyme display. Visit our wiki page or registry page to learn more!
Best Software Tool
This season, our team’s software efforts focused on informing wet lab’s experimental design as well as producing open source tools applicable to many computational workflows.
In silico tools are vital to synthetic biology. They enable researchers to design, model, optimize, and analyze systems in a rapid and cost-effective manner, and meduCA is no exception. The intersection of Bioinformatics and Modelling laid the foundation for our carbonic anhydrase selection process before we ever needed to pick up a pipette, while firmware enabled custom-built hardware to optimize our culture conditions. The groundwork for our software stack was laid by dagger, a package for intelligently parallelizing processes based on the flow of data. Then, building off this foundation, we designed miso, a framework for creating intuitive user interfaces to control hardware, and maestro, a novel workflow executor focused on making bioinformatics more accessible and reliable. While miso drives our hardware, and maestro powers our computational analyses, both frameworks were built with future iGEM teams in mind: extensible, open-source, and ready to accelerate the next generation of synthetic biology research.
Inclusivity Award
Our labs are not only places of discovery, they are also workplaces and livelihoods. But lab work can put real strain on the body, with musculoskeletal (MSK) disorders affecting anyone. Preventing these injuries is not just about safety; it is about making academia more inclusive and sustainable for all.
To address this, our team pursued an Inclusive Design Project where we developed an inclusive lab tool, specifically for a user experiencing MSK strain. Our process involved working closely with our stakeholder for various feedback cycles, measurement collections, and user requests. By focusing on one individual, we avoided generalization bias and ensured that feedback guided every stage of the design. We educated ourselves through the literature, created baseline designs and weighted decision matrices, and then applied iterative design-build-test-learn cycles throughout the season.
Through sketches, CAD models, clay prototypes, and expert input from various integrated Human Practices contacts, we developed a minimally viable, 3D-printed tool.
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.
Overall, the UBC Vancouver team has worked hard this season to reach every competition deliverable and hope that this page helps guide you through meduCA’s iGEM journey.
