Team:Amazonas Brazil/HP/Gold Integrated
Imagine an iGEMer life without standards, where 3A Assembly method has not yet been designed and engineering a new behavior is a unique effort-driven operation. It would be as manually debugging a program, e.g. without automatic tools. This is the current reality for CRISPR Cas9 machinery. Each iGEM team builds novel devices from scratch aiming to achieve their goals and perspectives. However, grounded in collaborations, our analysis demonstrated that teams face several obstacles through that complex path. We raise the lack of standardization and the difficulties to build and assemble devices as the major bottlenecks of CRISPR-based projects along iGEM.
In order to easily and reliably genetically engineered machines through CRISPR Cas9 machinery, we propose a framework to guide the development of iGEM projects: starting a collaborative network to bring creatives ideas, uncovering challenges and then mapping possibles issues. Finally, it will be possible to design, build, test and apply Synbio solutions to real-world problems. By being such a recent approach, it still lacks a standardized methodology, seems to take a long time, wet lab difficulties boosting the chance of designer shortcoming. And for iGEM? Would all the teams be designated to work unbridled and facing delays, lab difficulties and, after all, not accomplishing their goals? Project
How we did it
The next step was to list all the major setbacks faced while dealing with CRISPR and there are no best available sources than iGEM teams that had already worked with in previous seasons. Over that, we contacted these iGEMers to obtain information on how to minimize, prevent and repair technical flaws, in order to save time, human resources, materials and, more important, to go forward in wiping out these gaps.
Since its first appearance ー in 2011 ー 72 teams worked with CRISPR throughout iGEM. To start our collaboration network, we elaborated a formulary and send it through their collaborations pages. We also collected crucial information about every team that has worked with CRISPR till then.
What we found
Next steps
Going one step forward, we founded our project design highlighting iGEM struggles. Our perspective is to encourage overcoming it collaboratively, relying on the engagement power of our community, to expand and further facilitate the engineering of CRISPR systems. The constant updating of knowledge and foundation in previous works is essential to scientific construction and proved to be useful to our team. We believe that it can also be useful to future researches in this area of study as well.
