Sep 17, 2024 — Team initiation & topic choice (HMOs)

Although our university participated in 2016, 2017 and 2018, iGEM remained unfamous since the last participation. That is where, on Tuesday 17th September 2024, after 8 years without any mention of iGEM within our university walls, Pierre Fievet raised his hand. He is our team initiator and at this start of academic year 2024-2025, during the Masters’ program information meeting with all the new master’s students, he asked the question: “Professor, I saw a competition that is completely in our topic “Cellular biology and biochemistry”, how can we participate?”. After few weeks, almost all current members joined the team and agreed on a topic: HMOs.

Pierre did previously an internship in a research unit focusing on enzymes that have an activity towards carbohydrates, LABIRIS EnzAC [1], where he learned about HMOs and their importance for young babies. Unfortunately, not every mother can breastfeed their baby and so rely on infant formulas that have the best possible composition but still far from breast milk, especially concerning HMOs.

HMO production is still a challenge for chemical, enzymatic and monoculture production methods. That is why our group chose to create a bacterial platform that can accommodate HMO production with the ability to be used for other types of production by being editable at will, extending SyntCoLAB to issues we don’t even know yet.

Nov 19, 2024 — START-UP MEET’IN #3

The 3rd START-UP MEET’IN at Cercle du Lac [2], Louvain-la-Neuve, gathering successful Belgian startups, futures projects and professionals like incubators, opened their doors to our student project. During this early period, our objective was, firstly to enhance personal skills to present the project to professionals and intimidating people. And secondly to learn about how to collect money from companies, organizations and individuals.

We learned that collecting money is the hardest part for a project, student one or not. When we build our capital, we should keep in mind that emails are usually not read or not replied to by companies, even if the topic is on a desired research field because they fear letting information leak out. The speakers insisted that we needed proper support to present our project to them, that’s why we wrote a portfolio to present our ideas in the best way and how attractive our project can be. Additionally, we learned that collecting money from individuals and some companies won’t be easy for us because we don’t have any product yet and so no return on investment.

This crucial part was decided by vote: will we try to build up a start-up and so pretend for private funds or we will stay fundamental scientists and claim public funds? We chose the second option, and the money gathering was aimed at public agencies like the university and the government.

Last thing obtained during this meeting is some contacts with interested people like the delegated administrator head of the belgium part of Glaxosmithkline Biologicals [3], Emmanuel Amory, a huge pharma company in Belgium.

This meeting helped us to gather money and define our desire to run a foundational advance project.

Mar 6, 2025 — Engineering days

UCLouvain invited industrial compagnies for the “Engineering days” [4]. These companies were regrouped in a hall where students could meet and look up for future employment and internships. Our lab was near the hall, so we decided to look up. The present companies were not only focused on civil engineering but also on agronomic engineering, which was more interesting for us.

We talked to a few employees of different fields about finding research a financial support they could provide us. Unfortunately, the engineering field requires a final product and primary data about yields. We learned from these employees that if we wanted to have financial support from a company, the ideal situation is to look for big companies that can invest in research and have a specific budget allocated for that.

De Smet [5] working on carbon fixation showed interest in our bacterial production platform. Our basic idea of the project was to develop a high-yield production platform that would be as easy as possible to engineer and modify for different projects. This led to some conceptual validation of the project and after some research, we found that indeed splited metabolic pathways exist for carbon fixation [6] for this example but the whole concept of developing a production platform relying on 2 or more strains for a division of labor seemed a good answer to other issues than HMO production.

Mar 30, 2025 — Printemps des Sciences

Every year in Wallonia, scientific activities are organized for younger students to see what can be done using science and awaken their curiosity. We thought that participating in this “Printemps des Sciences” [7] was an important way to communicate our project and popularize synthetic biology basic principles.

We animated classical activities like petri dish cultures, DNA extraction and microscopy in addition to our poster and a card game designed to attract children to manipulate plants, animals and bacteria like a biologist.

Even though children loved the activities and especially the card game, they did not have any concerns about the project or questions. We hypothesized that the topic could be too far from them since they almost weren’t aware of bacteria existence. Additionally, to this success for our supports (card game and poster), our project intrigued the parents who asked many questions about DNA manipulation and the importance of HMOs. Some concerns arose: “Is this kind of production GMO friendly?”

For us, modifying organisms is done daily so this perspective led us to some research as we will see below. The position of this project in an industrial and legislated environment is something to keep in mind and the parents, even if a majority was hyped by the project, helped us to face this reality.

Additionally, a mother working in microbiology expressed her concerns about using Streptococcus thermophilus. From her experience, Streptococci tend to be a health hazard by biofilm formation. This issue could be a stop for HMO production that will benefit young babies. We checked precisely the literature and asked our lab PIs and found that S. thermophilus and more precisely LMD9 do not form biofilms. Indeed, S. thermophilus has a GRAS – Generally Recognized As Safe- status that we should value more in our presentations.

Apr 3, 2025 — ATG Start

To expand our possibilities in education, we contacted ATG start [8], a blog handled by Jonathan Ferooz, a biology doctor passionate by teaching and educative content, that already helped Belgian iGEM teams in the past. We met him and talked about our ideas to spread our project and synthetic biology to high school students regarding his work in scientific vulgarization.

He advised us to keep our card game simple with already broadly known rules for a 12- to-14-year-old student. We adapted the card game in consequence with explanatory text and more visual pictures made by a team member.

He was pleased with our idea to go to some schools to present the project but advised us to keep in contact during the presentation and not just do a PowerPoint presentation. We added some interactive activities to our presentation to make it more interesting for the students.

Finally, more globally about iGEM, he told us to focus on what is achievable and going step by step. This advice was key in the time we wanted to start everything. Keep the project simple and focus on what’s important for medals and for us. Get every aspect of the project to its end before going in other directions. This led us to split our lab objectives in 3 blocks, independent from each other to always have a project going.

Apr 16, 2025 — BNI

Through fortunate networking, we had the opportunity to participate in a networking session of BNI [9], the most important business network in Wallonia. Some industrial representants got interested in our project and our desire to scale up.

From this event, we expand our network and some precious tips for presenting the project without supports, that we can also use in poster sessions. We talked to much of science approach were the global problematic that the project aims to answer should be central and providing logical links towards the scientific approach.

This consideration helped us a lot to set up presentations in the future.

Apr 24, 2025 — BELSACT

Helped by some professors, we had the opportunity to present a poster to the 5th BELSACT meeting [10]. Belgian Society for Animal Cell Technology, or BELSACT, is a meeting regrouping professional scientist of cell culture sharing their advance, new technologies and limitations in their field. Our poster showing bacteria intrigued the scientists and applied a critical and larger scientific point of view that we needed.

A common remark was about the use of rapamycin as a glue in our aggregation system. Rapamycin is known in the animal biology field to activate the mTOR pathway [11]. The use of this compound would rely on a strict purification process that is hard for sugars like HMOs. We started to look for rapalogs, rapamycin analogs that don’t bind mTOR but still engineered FRB and FKBP, our two aggregating proteins.

This meeting was based on animal cell culture, so naturally we had questions about how to grow S. thermophilus and how handy it was in the lab. The usage of linear DNA and natural transformation to get our genetic constructions stunned some scientists. The idea of writing a handbook about S. thermophilus usage and interest in academia emerged in our head. This handbook could help future iGEM teams.

We also learned more about the criteria for a good poster and helped the presentation skills in English.

May 8, 2025 — Louvain Foundation

Louvain Foundation is an organism that collects benefactors’ money and sponsorships from companies to redistribute this money to innovative projects like theses or student projects. We have been selected upon 2 minutes video promotion to a poster presentation and the wanted prize. This was a unique opportunity to meet the upper echelons of our university and some sponsors and benefactors.

The UCLouvain rector, Françoise Smets, was present at this event and at the poster session, visiting every project. As a pediatrician, she highlighted the importance of HMOs in breast milk and especially the non-information about the subject among the population, even young parents. In addition to talking about synthetic biology and our project, we should spread the importance of HMOs in our presentations and activities.

The approval of a professional to insist on science vulgarization motivated us to produce educational content on our Instagram.

May 23-24, 2025 — BFH European Meet-up

BFH European meet-up [12], organized by Frankfurt University this year is a meeting inviting all iGEM teams across Europe to present their project in poster session and in PowerPoint presentation. Allowing teams to collect professional advice from iGEM judges and 2024 Marburg team. This meeting offered us many opportunities to enhance the sharpen our project, especially during PowerPoint presentation, hosted with 4 professionals.

During the question an answer time, we got the opportunity to detail our idea to use rapalogs instead of rapamycin but the judges, disliking rapamycin at first, thought that it would reduce the yield of our aggregation. This is not something we thought about and after consideration, we chose to change the aggregation proteins in plant field with induced aggregation using phytohormones.

During the poster session, Florian Hänsel, working on SynComs too [13], was interested in the future of our project. He was worried about our management if, under microscopy, we don’t have a 50/50 ratio between our two aggregated strains. With some ideas exchange, we agreed on a metabolic dependency which would be based on sugar metabolism since S. thermophilus do not use much different carbohydrate sources.

The idea of using S. thermophilus as a chassis was nicely received. Judges advised us to make a real point of the project the idea to popularize this chassis. In later poster presentation, we encountered Freiburg team, using Bacillus subtilis as a chassis for surface display so we submitted the idea of using S. thermophilus since we had scientific background of it, but we did not pursuit this idea even though it hyped the team for a collaboration.

June 25, 2025 — Agathe Urvoas

After some research about our aggregation module, we went from FRB/FKBP interaction around the rapamycin to some ideas about phytohormones triggered aggregation. We called a collaborator of our PI, Agathe Urvoas, that developed a bank of proteins called alpha-rep [14-15], binding proteins that could, with a nano-body, form a tripartite complex without overlap around a GFP. Pr. Urvoas gave us her expertise on the alpha-rep sequence and how inserting it in our construction.

From this call, we had the precise sequence of a protein of interest and a new aggregation complex that no longer relies on rapamycin and should have a high specificity due to the alpha-rep and the nano-body binding properties.

July 18, 2025 — Call with our coach

Since we want to popularize S. thermophilus, we questioned ourselves about the part submission since we don’t rely on plasmids but on linear DNA using the natural competence of our bacterium. We asked Léa Meneu from Montpellier team of 2018 how we are supposed to deposit our parts.

For this call, we learned that we should focus on at least one well prepared biobrick, with experiment proof and correctly check the restriction sites that cannot appear on our part before ordering any construction. This allowed us to finalize the ordering of our synthetic genes.

Additionally, she advised us to contact hospitals or pediatricians to have some support coming from health professionals. Our project could interest them. The first thought Léa got was towards the people that could benefit from more HMO-rich infant formulas, and she insisted on the fact that LGBT couples could have interest in this kind of product. We integrated this point in our inclusivity quest especially by interviewing a LGBT member of our institute that was open to this kind of topics.

Aug 9, 2025 — KU Leuven collaboration

KU Leuven team, the second university team in Belgium invited us to a repeat of our respective presentations followed by a question-and-answer session. This collaboration led to broadening our vision about inclusivity. We mainly focused on making sciences accessible for everyone and making this field inclusive where they showed us that we could make our project inclusive by translating the wiki or make our figures and color palette colorblind friendly.

Sep 9, 2025 — Meeting with Prof. Marc Boutry

To follow up on the GMO problematic, initiated on March 29th, we met Marc Boutry, a UCLouvain professor emeritus who gave some interviews [16] and wrote a book [17] about GMOs. From this meeting, we have learned that no matter how our bacterial production platform is considered (GMO or non-GMO regarding the natural transformation), if we purify our product to empty S. thermophilus from the medium, it will be accepted for commercialization. This view helped us to consider the future of the project, looking after purification processes.

Sep 11, 2025 — Travel to Prague

The meeting organized by BohemiaBio on September 12-13th was in Prague, our team went there by plane. In the train we encountered a person working in communication that listened to our presentation. He gave us pieces of advice about how to place texts and images to trap the human eye and so deliver the information more easily. He brought some modifications to our PowerPoint with this aim. This slideshow will be the template for our future presentations to enhance our delivery directly through the slide composition, thing that was unknown by our group before.

Sep 12-13, 2025 — BohemiaBio (Prague)

Prague team, BohemiaBio, invited us and a few other teams to meet up and practice presentation in front of iGEM judges. Additionally, to the feedback given by these judges, we planned to write a shared handbook with BohemiaBio about GMO based products. Like us, they want to insert a metabolic pathway transgenomically to produce compounds of interests transgenetically directly in a final product. This collaboration will help both our projects by thinking about more diverse techniques for product purification that could be the specialty of one of our labs.

During the feedback session given by the judges, we had time to explain all our side projects about education and inclusivity. Here we had a lot of improvement points. First, we did not focus enough on the vulgarization of our project, we aimed too much at synthetic biology or HMOs whereas the idea is to make SyntCoLAB shine. Secondly, the ideas we got, in general for education like going into schools, are activities that are usually done by other teams, and we must step up if we want to stand out in the competition.

Sep 15, 2025 — Forms about HMOs

To learn more about the industrial world about HMOs, we submitted anonymous forms to industries. From these forms, we were questioned again on our purification process and the presence or absence of bacteria in the product medium.

One specific comment, from a general manager, raised some questions for us: what is the impact on the texture and the smell of the infant formulas? Before, we have never thought about baby appreciation. If our project goes to an end product, the comparison with breast milk and current accepted infant formulas in terms of physical product and not just a chemical product.

Sep 16, 2025 — Kilian Dekoninck

Approaching the Grand Jamboree, we wanted to define precise points and objectives for our final presentation. We contacted a member of the 2016 UCLouvain iGEM team, Kilian Dekoninck, for additional information. From this call, we agreed on the point that a maximum of 3 members should present the project on stage. Concerning the delivery of the presentation, considering that all presentations are followed by each other, we must be catchy, well place the context of the project and correctly link the more interesting results to this dense introduction.

We will put more effort into developing the precise context of the project, including market analysis, not only literature analysis.

Sep 17, 2025 — Soapbox Science

From the very beginning of our iGEM journey, we wanted to invest ourselves in promoting inclusivity in science. To this end, we launched a YouTube channel dedicated to this topic. We interviewed several scientists with diverse profiles (a pregnant woman, a man, a mother, and a person with ADHD) about their careers. Our goal was to show that science is accessible to everyone, regardless of their background.

In order to obtain the opinion of external and qualified people regarding our ideas, we contacted Soapbox Science [18], a science outreach initiative run by the Royal Observatory of Belgium that aims to promote inclusivity in science by organising talks. This exchange was extremely valuable. Not only did it reassure us that our videos were a good way to make a difference, but Marta and Caroline also gave us plenty of advice. They provided us with data on inclusivity at the European level and recommended that we share our videos in schools. In addition, they shared their own experiences as women in science and described cases of discrimination they had witnessed. These testimonies made us realise even more the importance of taking action.

Sep 25, 2025 — Nestlé

In order to have a more precise idea of the global challenge of HMOs production and especially collecting the opinion of an industrial, we contacted Nestlé through Cathérine Heugens [19-20].

From this call, we learned important information about HMOs education. In fact, there is a conflict of interest and industries selling HMOs-enriched infant formulas cannot communicate about HMOs since mothers could think that these formulas are better or equal to breastfeeding. This would be against the World Health Organization recommendation: “WHO and UNICEF recommend that children initiate breastfeeding within the first hour of birth and be exclusively breastfed for the first 6 months of life” [21]. We saw that our thin education to the world about HMOs is important for common knowledge and could help parents and future parents.

Additionally, Cathérine Heugens told us more precisely their position in the HMOs product market and how important HMO production is important to enhance the quality of their products.

From this call, we planned the publication of Instagram posts specifically teaching about HMOs.

References

1. Enzymes Actives sur Carbohydrates - EnzAC - Labiris
2. Start-Up Meet'In 2024 | 3ème édition | Cercle du Lac
3. Home | GSK Belgium
4. Journées de l'Industrie 2025
5. Home | De Smet Engineers & Contractors (DSEC)
6. S. Luo et al., “Construction and modular implementation of the THETA cycle for synthetic CO₂ fixation”, Nat Catal, 6(12):1228-1240, Dec. 2023. doi:10.1038/s41929-023-01079-z
7. Printemps des Sciences 2025 • Eau-rêka! | Sciences.be
8. ATG start
9. Accueil | Français (FR) | BF-11 BNI Louvain-la-Neuve Talent
10. 5th BELSACT Scientific Meeting
11. V. Panwar et al., “Multifaceted role of mTOR (mammalian target of rapamycin) signaling pathway in human health and disease”, Signal Transduction and Targeted Therapy, 8(1):375, Oct. 2023. doi:10.1038/s41392-023-01608-z
12. BFH European Meetup
13. CEPLAS: Florian Hänsel
14. Alpha Rep – Institute for Integrative Biology of the Cell
15. A. Chevrel et al., “Specific GFP-binding artificial proteins (αRep): a new tool for in vitro to live cell applications”, Bioscience Reports, 35(4):e00223, Aug. 2015. doi:10.1042/BSR20150080
16. Marc Boutry: « Oui, les arguments contre les OGM se sont écroulés » | L'Echo
17. Des plantes OGM qui vous veulent du bien !
18. Soapbox Science Brussels
19. Nestlé: Good food, good life | Nestlé global
20. Catherine Heugens
21. Breastfeeding WHO