Edinburgh iDEC Team Success

The International Directed Evolution Comptetion (iDEC) competition ran in Cambridge over 26- 27 October 2024. iDEC is an international public welfare initiative dedicated to building a scientific community to facilitate education, technology sharing, and academic exchange.

Directed Evolution is a Nobel Prize-winning technique used to engineer proteins to perform a desired function. It involves subjecting the gene to iterative rounds of mutation, then selecting the variant which produces the desired outcome. 

The Edinburgh iDEC team project focuses on enhancing protein adhesion to plastics. 

The discovery of a plastic-degrading enzymes in Nature offers a promising avenue for development of biotechnological solutions to the vast amounts of plastic waste which exists in our landfills and has spilled into our environment. 

The team hypothesised that these processes may be accelerated by co-localisation of biocatalysts to the plastic surface, thereby mimicking natural systems in which microbes first adhere to the plastic surface through biofilm formation. 

Previous research has demonstrated that overexpression of plasmid-encoded cell surface proteins Antigen 43 (Ag43) and Curli in Escherichia coli enhances adhesion to a variety of plastics. In this project, they aimed to use directed evolution to identify variants with enhanced adhesion to polystyrene, an exemplar plastic.   

Industry Group Award

• Industry Advisory Group Nominee

Single Awards

• Best Presentation Winner
• Funniest Evolution Winner

Track awards

• Best Molecular Evolutionary Outcome Nominee

General Awards

• Silver Award

The project was supported by the Edinburgh Genome Foundry, a research facility specialised in the modular assembly of DNA constructs using a highly automated robotic platform. and a team of advisors that included Dr Joanna Sadler, Prof Chris French, Dr Nadanai Laohakunakorn and Dr Heather Barker in the School of Biological Sciences at The University of Edinburgh.