From 2012e.igem.org

Project description.

During the last years, the iGEM competition has represented a force that promotes the development of ideas and projects by undergraduate students, in this way iGEM can be considered as a unique event because it has stimulated thousands of students go from just imagining projects, to actually making them. All of this has generated an extensive amount of synthetic biology projects, each one of them focused on the resolution of specific problems, some of them so remarkable as they are environmental conflicts and others, less socially noticeable like circuits for genetic regulation.

Nevertheless, there is an interesting situation regarding the time passed since the start of the iGEM competition and thus the fomentation of synthetic biology, and is the lack of wet-lab projects that actually reach the general community through the implementation of tangible solutions. So, it is time to do something about it, it is time to solve the problems all these projects were made to, by creating an industry based on synthetic biology.

Our project aims this: the establishment of an industry based on what has been developed until now in this field of synthetic biology by taking the lab solutions to the real problems and making them work. Also, this idea has emerged from the application of one of the principles commonly found in this competition and in synthetic biology, the use of standard genetic parts and their utilization on solving different situations.

Since nowadays we can find a great variety of projects, there is an extensive opportunity area inside synthetic biology, one of those is the use of biosensors. This topic has been of particular interest to our team because it includes a wide quantity of projects. All these projects mean many possible solutions for different problems. However, development of these solutions outside the iGEM competition has not been observed, thus making evident the necessity for the industry presented.

Inside the opportunity area that can be found in this topic of biosensors, there are highlighted the advantages of using this technologies over the use of classical and actual methodologies. Among them, there is the viability, simplicity and the promotion of the use of green technology.

In this way, it can be stated that a business plan for the development of a company based on biosensors, could be a good example for the importance and feasibility of making industry based on synthetic biology projects, not leaving them in just possible solutions, but implementing them for the continuos improvement of this society that we live in.

Executive Resumé

On the last decades, society has witnessed the drastic consequences of pollution around the world, specially on public health and food production. The World Health Organization estimates a total of 15 to 18 million kids on developing countries suffers from permanent brain damage because of lead poisoning. In order to try to solve this, many companies have been created to work on monitoring and cleaning the polluting compounds on very different areas. A critic one is the water bodies that are constantly polluted with residues from plastic, automobile and chemical industries, which represent the most used processes around the globe. And while all of them are submitted to environmental quality controls in order to regulate and reduce the polluted areas, there has not been an adequate correlation between the pollution detection technology and the bioremediation the world needs. The principal reason for this is to depend on a detection technology that is expensive, slow and requires highly trained personnel.

Therefore a change has to be made and take advantage of the recombinant DNA technology, specifically Synthetic Biology. SenSyn will drive this change by innovating the detection processes applying the Synthetic Biology in a dependable and eco-friendly manner. This will be achieved based on the generation of specific biosensors to every need known so far, and adaptable to the changes that can arise either from the problem itself or the user. SenSyn technology can reduce the time and cost for the contaminants detection without compromising the efficiency and accuracy demanded on the environmental analysis. Besides this, every SenSyn product will obey the No Contamination rule. This means that every biosensor will be 100% biodegradable and every package will be eco-friendly, helping the critic problem of public pollution in Mexico where only the 12% of the 5 million tons of garbage is collected.

In SenSyn every product is designed to be easy to use and to interpret its results. Which means time saving and cost efficient in both the method itself and the personnel training. So anyone with a technical approach can get used to SenSyn products in matter of minutes and won’t need the 3 to 5 years of experience in the field that is required with other high-tech methods and equipments. And above all SenSyn can assure its customers unparalleled security so every synthetically designed organism can be detected among native organisms everytime and its propagation will be contained from the beginning as part of its design. Therefore we are positively sure that our genetically safe products will be approved by the corresponding organisms around the world.

SenSyn products will be managed in 3 principal and leading generations. The products from the 1st generation will be on the market by the end of the first year. Along the second year this market will have international boundaries and the investigation for the development of the 2nd generation products will be achieved. By the third year the products from the first generation will be consolidated globally by means of quality control certifications and the 2nd generation products will be ready for the production stage. The fourth year will have the introduction to the market of the 2nd generation products and from this point each new generation products will get to the market every two years.

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