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Judging Comments

This year, despite our relatively ambitious project, our team achieved goals in several different areas.

We successfully modelled, designed, characterised and entered our sporulation tuning kinA BioBrick ([http://partsregistry.org/wiki/index.php?title=Part:BBa_K174011 BBa_K174011]) in the parts registry.

We also improved an existing BioBrick part ([http://partsregistry.org/wiki/index.php?title=Part:BBa_K174004 BBa_K174004]) rendering it tightly regulated.

Futhermore, we helped the UQ-Australia iGEM2009 team (Helping other teams) by building a template model for their system and sending it to them.

We developed a bacterial population simulation, primarily to assist in examining the affect of our removal of germination in the 'sequestering spores', which combines distributed computing, biochemical models and agent based modelling.

We also modelled all the components of our project's system, and we designed and entered 16 other BioBrick parts and devices, ranking from a degradation controller system to a tightly regulated metal sensing promoter. We believe that several of the BioBrick parts we designed, in addition to our three favourite parts, are novel and can be used not only in the context of our project but in a variety of different systems.

Our [http://partsregistry.org/wiki/index.php?title=Part:BBa_K174002 degradation controller device] is arabinose inducible and should be useful beyond our own project, to tightly regulate the levels of protein in a range of synthetic systems. Our device allows us to exert a third form of control over the expression level of a protein of interest, in addition to the transcriptional and translational regulation already widely used in Synthetic Biology.

Our [http://partsregistry.org/wiki/index.php?title=Part:BBa_K174015 cadmium sensitive promoter] BioBrick is novel since there is no previously available cadmium specific promoter. Our combinatorial approach, using two different transcriptional repressors is a tightly regulated promoter which can be used by any cadmium-sensitive system.

Our [http://partsregistry.org/wiki/index.php?title=Part:BBa_K174003 heritable, tunable, stochastic switch] is novel since the device can be tuned to be biased by altering the amount of invertase protein.

Finally we believe that our aim of controlling stochasticity in the differentiation process to alter the behaviour of soil bacterium is a worthy aim and the idea of packaging cadmium in spores is unique.