A synthetic biology team needed one record for a project split across two labs

The University of Oxford’s 2026 iGEM team set out to protect honeybees from one of their biggest threats, the Varroa mite. Their work was split across a wet lab and a bee lab, while the team juggled earning their degrees alongside competition R&D work. Having a single place to keep their protocols, sequences and results was crucial. Here’s how Lab Thread helped.

Coordinating fourteen students across three disciplines

The University of Oxford team brings together 14 undergraduates from biochemistry, biology and engineering. Many are in their first or second year, and for most it was their first experience of a team research project.

“It’s very multidisciplinary. We’ve got biochemists, we’ve got biologists, we’ve got an engineer.”

Every iGEM team needs a principal investigator (PI), the senior scientist who hosts and supervises the work. The Oxford team had two. Dr Hafez El-Sayyed supervised the wet lab, where the team developed and produced their RNA. Professor Geraldine Wright, a leading honeybee researcher, hosted the team at Oxford’s John Krebs Field Station Bee Lab in Wytham Woods, where they tested their work on bees.

Each lab had its own team lead, responsible for designing experiments and keeping the work on track. Samples and results moved constantly between the two.

Nectar: silencing the Varroa mite

Inspiration for the project came from Fundraising Lead, Roman. Roman’s grandfather is a beekeeper in western Ukraine, so he grew up hearing about the damage caused by the Varroa mite.

Varroa is the single biggest driver of honeybee colony loss. It weakens bees, shortens their lives and spreads viruses, which has a knock-on effect on harvests and food systems. The usual treatment is a chemical pesticide (an acaricide) applied to the hive, but these chemicals are toxic to bees and to people, and mites are becoming resistant to them.

Nectar uses RNA interference (RNAi) to silence several genes the Varroa mite needs to survive at once. The idea is that targeting several genes at once will make it harder for mites to develop resistance, and that this mechanism will kill off the mite, while leaving the bee unaffected.

Their double-stranded RNA (dsRNA) is designed with a double-hairpin-loop structure to improve stability and help it last longer once applied. If Nectar’s proof of concept proves successful, their platform could be re-used against future bee pests by simply swapping the target sequence.

Making dsRNA. To make dsRNA cheaply and at scale, the team engineered yeast to produce it. They cloned their dsRNA design into a plasmid and transformed it into yeast, which then produces the dsRNA itself.

Delivering the biopesticide. They blended the dsRNA producing yeast into pollen patty, a food supplement that beekeepers already use. Nurse bees eat the patty and pass the dsRNA on to developing larvae through the food they secrete. The dose is aimed at the fifth larval stage, when a bee is most vulnerable to Varroa, and mites take in the dsRNA as they feed on the larvae.

Measuring success. While the yeast production route was being developed, the team made dsRNA in the wet lab using in vitro transcription (IVT), which gave them sufficient material to test in the bee lab, and answer questions including: how much dsRNA passes from nurse bees to larvae? How long does it last in bee haemolymph? Do shorter or longer strands survive better? Where does it travel inside the bee? How could they be certain that the dsRNA itself didn’t harm the bees? Samples then went back from the bee lab to the wet lab for analysis.

One connected record across every lab

With the team working across two labs, information was spread across Google Docs, paper notebooks and notes on people’s phones, and sequence designs were shared as separate files, so the team ended up juggling several versions of the same design. As Roman put it, they had “probably three or four different ways of gathering information.” Moving everything into Lab Thread, organised by project, resolved it: each project held its protocols, notebook entries and results together, so anyone could find what they needed. To make a control RNA for their bee feeding assays, for example, the in vitro transcription (IVT) protocol sat in one notebook entry, the bee feeding protocol in another, and the sequence design alongside both, all within the same project.

[One place per project] “The most crucial thing about Lab Thread was the fact that we could organise all of our ELNs on each project, so we could put protocols on each project and results on each project.”

Keeping the science together extended to the sequences themselves. The team linked their plasmid and oligo files directly to their notebook entries and used Lab Thread’s molecular biology tools to add primers and finalise their designs. Because those files were edited live in one shared place, there was only ever one current version, which meant “no multiple backdated versions that had to be shuffled through,” a problem they had hit before when sharing files between team members. Data and analysis sat in the same context: the team uploaded their datasets as CSV and Excel files and kept their statistical analysis right next to the experiments it came from, presented, Roman said, in a way “much clearer than Google Docs.”

Report-ready records, start to finish

The real test came at the end of the competition, when the team had to turn months of work into their project wiki. Their protocols, experiments and notes were already organised in Lab Thread, so writing up was a matter of copying them across and formatting them to iGEM’s guidelines.

“Having all the documents and labelled sequences next to each other was very useful when it came to writing our final paper. We would just copy and paste protocols into the wiki. Same thing goes with experiments and procedures. All of the notes that were on Lab Thread were also a simple copy and paste.”

Throughout the competition, the Lab Thread team kept in close contact and responded quickly. When the team needed more seats for new members, their workspace was upgraded the same day, and their feedback went straight to Lab Thread’s product team to make the platform even easier for next year’s iGEM teams. Lab Thread is proud to have sponsored the University of Oxford’s 2026 iGEM team. Roman’s advice to future teams is to start early: set up your projects and notebooks from day one, so every protocol, sequence and result is captured as you go, ready for write-up at the end.