Team:CU-Boulder/Collaborations
This year, we decided early on to try and reach out to other iGEM teams who we might be able to help, or could help us. Of particular interest to us was a BioBrick and iGEM-internal system for non-canonical amino acid incorporation, because even until now our pEVOL AzoPhe incorporation plasmid remains something of a black box to us.
We ended up reaching out to and collaborating with Bielefeld-CiBiTec, whose project focused on the development of new non-canonical base pairs to try and expand the genetic code. While we were not ultimately able to test out their new system, we did provide them with some of our ncAA (AzoPhe) and the incorporation plasmid so that they could test it against their own system for ncAA incorporation. We also sent them a number of plasmids from our own project, which they graciously validated in their own lab as working as intended, and also provided us with some beautiful imaging data you can see below.
