An interdisciplinary team of University of Alberta undergraduate students came up with an innovative solution to the rampant waste caused by the fast fashion industry — and won a gold medal at an international competition for their work.
The team used genetically modified E. coli bacteria to break down waste fabric such as wool and mixed textiles into amino acids and sugars, which were then used as feedstock to make spider silk.
Synthetic spider silk is highly valued in industries like biomedicine, airplane manufacturing and fashion due to its strength, durability and flame resistance.
The U of A won gold among 400 other teams from around the world at the iGEM Grand Jamboree in Paris in October. The competition tasks students from 50 countries with identifying and solving global problems using synthetic biology or “international genetically engineered machines.”
“Synthetic biology is engineering cells to do cool stuff or make useful things or both,” says faculty supervisor David Stuart, a professor of biochemistry. “iGEM encourages students to look around at their communities, their environments locally and globally, and just ask the question, ‘What can I do?’”
“Trends like fast fashion cause people to buy more and more low-quality clothing, so more clothing ends up getting thrown out,” explains team member Youssef Mohamed, a third-year student taking a double major in biological science and psychology in the Faculty of Science.
“Most are produced with multiple materials blended together, and it’s that interwoven aspect that makes it really challenging to break them down and recycle them.”
“I was drawn to iGEM because it was the opportunity to work on a truly student-directed project to tackle a real-world issue using synthetic biology,” says team member Annie Tang, a fourth-year immunology student in the Faculty of Medicine & Dentistry and the Faculty of Science. “I would say to other students to consider joining iGEM if they have the opportunity.”
Harnessing bacteria to help
Only 15 per cent of the 92 million tonnes of textile waste produced globally each year gets recycled or repurposed, and often those processes use harmful chemicals, according to the students’ website.
The U of A team brainstormed and realized that harmless E. coli — used in many bioengineering projects — might be able to help. They invented a two-step system by adding genetic structures known as “plasmids” to the bacteria. In the first step, the bacteria receive and replicate instructions to degrade clothing made from materials such as keratin and cellulose. In the second step, a different set of bacteria get instructions to produce spider silk.
The team made “significant progress” in designing and optimizing the process, but ran out of time to actually try it. They are hoping the 2025 iGEM team will continue the work to build the bioreactor, test with different materials and explore the method’s potential.
“We’d like to continue finding new enzymes, using different concentrations of enzymes, applying them in different ratios, even testing different organisms that might have better capacity for producing all the genes we need,” says Mohamed, who led the student sub-group that worked in the lab. “Hopefully, with further experiments and studying, we can degrade all sorts of waste products.”
“It’s doable in principle,” says Stuart. “But this is real live research, it’s not from a textbook, and we can’t always tell what's going to happen or where it’s going to go. It’s innovation.”
Solving practical problems
A 2023 study on the impact of iGEM programs across Canada between 2008 and 2022 on the future career paths of student participants showed that 40 per cent continued to use biology skills in their jobs, one in five started their own company and one in three commercialized a technology.
The U of A’s team this year comprised 24 students from four faculties, including science, medicine, the Faculty of Arts and the Faculty of Engineering. Participants worked together to come up with the plan, interview potential industry users such as clothing manufacturer lululemon, develop metabolic models on computers, work with the bacteria, fundraise, share the science with high school students through outreach events, and present the work on stage in Paris. They competed in the undergraduate category for fashion and cosmetics with a focus on sustainability.
Tang says she learned a lot from working with students from other faculties. “It teaches you to be resilient and it really teaches you the importance of teamwork and having to communicate with those around you to stay on track,” she says.
Mohamed says he learned a lot about molecular biology, “but I think the most valuable thing that I personally came away with was leadership abilities. This was my first time being on a student team as a leader.”
Stuart says iGEM teams have tackled a wide range of problems in the 20 years the program has run at the U of A. One group made a biosensor to detect funguses that infect honeybees. Another designed a way to identify estrogen contamination in water. Last year’s team, which won a silver medal, engineered a detector for a fungal pathogen in cereal crops and then designed a drone system that a farmer can operate with a cellphone. Another past iGEM technology launched the Calgary-based biotech company FREDsense, which does water analysis.
Stuart, who co-supervised the team with academic teaching staff lecturer Marina Lazic of biological sciences, says the 2024 U of A iGEM team won gold because each sub-team was effective and communicated well with the whole group.
“In the iGEM competition it’s not only the idea and the execution of the science, it’s also about how much outreach there is to the community and how time is spent interacting with possible users of the technology, as well as outstanding computer science, media and administration.
“All of those things combined made a gold-medal group,” says Stuart, who is also director of graduate programs for biochemistry and a member of the Women and Children’s Health Research Institute, the Cancer Research Institute of Northern Alberta and the Li Ka Shing Institute of Virology.
Along with student bake sales and pub nights, the 2024 iGEM program was supported by GenomeAlberta, The Pint, ThermoFisher Scientific, New England BioLabs, Zymo Research, GeneBio Systems, Inc., Microbiology and Climate Change, the Faculty of Medicine & Dentistry, the College of Natural & Applied Sciences, the Faculty of Science, the Department of Biological Sciences, SnapGene, Integrated DNA Technologies, the Undergraduate Research Initiative and the Student Innovation Centre.
