Team:Judd UK/Pages/Collaborations

Collaborations

Kent

For our Interlab studies, we asked the Kent iGEM team to help us out because we do not have the equipment to accurately obtain the necessary readings. Laulwa Al Salloum, Dan Brunkow and Laurens Heling from the Kent team offered us a lab to work in as well helping and mentoring Mateo Hoare and Nikita Shukan from the Judd_UK iGEM team with the new equipment including using Gilson Pipettes and a plate reader. The Kent team were unsuccessful in transforming the DNA provided by iGEM into competent E. coli DH5 alpha and, so, as part of a collaborations effort, we offered our Interlab DNA (Distribution Kit Plate 6) for them to work with.

Oxford

After meeting at the UK team meet-up, the Oxford team introduced our modelling team to mass action kinetics, along with the hill equation and some basic Matlab codes as an introduction to programming in Matlab.

CLSB

<img src="337px-Judd_UK_CLSBlogo.jpg" width="10%" class="left"> <img src="T--CLSB-UK--hardware_judd.jpg">

We met with CLSB to discuss wiki development and modelling. They gave us a lot of help and advice for the wiki, including what languages it would be useful to learn, and some general advice about iGEM, such as the standard page names, uploading files, and how much time we should expect to spend on the wiki. For the modelling, they introduced the team to ordinary differential equations and how they can be used to represent a series of reactions. They also gave advice during the process, checking over our analytical solutions, as well as our numerical methods in Matlab.

The CLSB team came to us to test their software. Their software was a lab assistant with voice commands to read out part information and protocols. We tested their software, and suggested adding a team lookup feature, the ability to repeat a step (as opposed to just next and back) and a skip command to jump to a particular step in a protocol. They implemented the first two we suggested, but found the last one wouldn't be feasible, as it caused conflicts with their part lookup feature.

We also tested their hardware- a combined densitometer and fluorometer and suggested a few improvements. Firstly, we noticed that their readings were being slightly skewed by additional light entering the device from the environment because their light sensor was being secured by electrical tape so we suggested blue tac, which overcame this problem. We also thought that when their data was being recorded they would benefit from being able to download that data as well as having a corresponding number to keep track of their measurements – these changes were implemented after our meeting. Take a look at the CSLB wiki to find more information on their software and hardware.

(Photo from CLSB)