Team:Linkoping Sweden
Hello and welcome to our Wiki!
We are the team from Linköping University in Sweden and we are participating in the international synthetic biology competition called iGEM. The competition takes place in Boston every year where over 300 teams from all over the world present their projects. The competitions goal is to try and solve a real world problems with the help of synthetic biology, but also to share our results and methods to promote an open and good research community.
Below you will find a summary of our Wiki and direct links to the pages that catches your interest. Feel free to Contact us with any questions.
About the Project
Now, since you are here you are naturally wonder what we are doing. This year we are going to try and optimize the amount of protein that is produced in an E. coli bacteria. We will hopefully obtain an increase of protein by trying different chaperones and subject the bacteria for different environmental conditions. The proteins we are focusing on are Tau and Amyloid beta, which are linked to Alzheimer’s disease.
About Us
We are 11 students from Linköping University and we all have an interest in synthetic biology. In total there are three different fields of studies involved, chemical biology, engineering biology and medical biology. So we are a lot of biology nerds that want to test our knowledge and see how far we can come.
Model
Synthetic biological modeling is trying to describe what happens in cells (E. coli in our case) with the help of mathematical formulas. So with the help of math, try and describe what happens in the cell when it gets folded to its active form. To build a model from the first little number to the point that it somewhat decently describes a live cell is complicated and based on A TON of previous studies and articles. Luckily for us we have a model to base ours on, called FoldEco. When the model is done, we will begin to feed it our data that we have obtained from experiments in the lab and start a feedback process where the model and experimentation affect each other to obtain the optimal condition for protein production. Hopefully.
Human Practices
We have tried and decide what we want the focus on, synthetic biology or the reason why we have targeted the proteins we have. In general it could have been a number of aggregate prone proteins but we chose to work with the ones linked with Alzheimer’s disease to give it a connection to a real life problem. Because if our method works it would be easier for researchers to study these proteins in a larger quantity and hopefully in a better quality than before.
Before Us
We are the 5th LiU iGEM team since it started in 2013. A lot of people has come before us and who are we to not mention our proud heritage. All of the previous Wikis are still online and working fine if you are curious as to what has been done before. We can recommended 2015’s LiU iGEM because they made a song cover as an (unfinished) part of their policy and practice or why not start at the beginning with 2013’s LiU iGEM.
