Team:Edinburgh UG/Collaborations

Collaborations

iGEM Community

We were delighted to co-host and participate in the iGEM Northern U.K. meet-up. There we got to present our project in its early stages to Nottingham, Manchester, Glasgow, and Newcastle. This fostered further discussions and of course gave us the opportunity to learn about some of the incredible projects that were happening nearby. As a result of the meet-up, we stayed in touch with the Nottingham and Glasgow teams in particular, and further collaborations are noted below.

Nottingham

We worked with Nottingham at various stages of our project. We stayed in contact using social media and Skype, and we got the chance to speak to them as we were going through formative changes in each of our projects. Furthermore, we also participated in helping them further test their cell rehydration system and give them more data on how well their product worked after being shipped.

Glasgow

Glasgow were very helpful to our team, as we lacked engineers but took it upon ourselves to develop a microfluidic device anyway. Glasgow also developed a fluidic device, and they were very helpful to our team, providing feedback on the design and build of our device during its early stages. Furthermore, they also met with Helena and Joe to improve the function of our 3D printed syringe pumps and helped us design software so the syringe pumps could function.

Technion Israel

Technion Israel got in touch with our team as a result of our collaboration request posted on the iGEM collaboration hub. While it was ultimately not efficient for us to collaborate in the wet lab, we were able to work together very significantly in the dry lab. Technion thought we could aide them in developing a model for their “kill-switch” construct, which utilised Cre/Lox, and we were very happy to try and apply our model to a new circumstance. In the end, our model was able to tell them what concentration of Cre would be required to activate nearly all kill-switches, which was influential in the design and conceptualisation of their project downstream. In addition, it further demonstrated the utility and accuracy of our model in another context. Check out a "snapshot" of our results below and read our modelling page for the full story! Furthermore, Technion Israel helped us develop our Human Practices even further, participating in our skill-exchange questionnaire, spending hours writing about their experiences communicating with scientists from other disciplines.

iGEM Bulgaria

iGEM Bulgaria also responded to our collaboration request that was posted on the iGEM collaboration hub. In this instance, we were actually able to help them by sending materials for use in the wet lab. Specifically, iGEM Bulgaria wanted to try new means of chromosomal integration, so we provided them with the Serine Integrase Bxb1 and the recombineering plasmids pSIM7 and pSIM9, so they could attempt various methods of chromosomal integration in E. coli should any method not work. They were also very obliging in helping our team with human practices as well, answering our detailed skill-exchange questions, which helped us gain a better understanding of communication between biologists and engineers in particular.

Edinburgh OG

As a collaboration, we have helped the Edinburgh_OG team by giving them the E. coli BL21(DE3) and C600, essential to work with T7 and P1 phages respectively. We provided them the electroporator, used for the λ phage work to electroporate their constructs into the phage. Finally, we did a join presentation at the for 30 people through the Synthetic biology society at the University of Edinburgh to raise awareness and interest about iGEM by explaining the competition and our projects.

Our team is also greatly indebted to the Edinburgh_OG team for their help on giving advice and providing direction to our modelling, which led us into developing the stochastic model, a more accurate algorithm in describing the behaviour of our system.