Collaborations

Teams we collaborated with

Amazonas

As a team based in the United Kingdom, we did not have first hand knowledge about Chagas disease. The Amazonas iGEM team put us in contact with Professor Jaila Borges who was able to inform us about how South American governments address the disease. They also translated a survey we sent them (into Portuguese) and disseminated it to the public in Brazil, a country affected by Chagas disease. This was instrumental in improving our understanding of the type of diagnostic that populations in Chagas-endemic regions prefer. The survey results can be found here.

AQA Unesp

The team at AQA Unesp also translated (into Portuguese) and conducted our survey in Brazil. The survey results can be found here. In return, we were able to give them information about how type I diabetes is addressed and treated in the UK.

TEC CEM

Many countries in the Americas including Mexico are affected by Chagas disease even though it is most widespread in Bolivia and Brazil. The team at TEC CEM translated (into Spanish) our survey and distributed it amongst the Mexican public. This gave us essential insight into public awareness of Chagas disease as well as the Mexican public’s views towards potential diagnostic tools for the disease. The survey results can be found here.

City of London School

We met the City of London School iGEM team during the UK iGEM meetup in July. They needed help with their kinetic modelling, which we were happy to provide. We helped them convert their models in Javascript to Matlab to better model their system.

Judd School

At the UK iGEM meetup, the Judd school approached us for help with their kinetic modelling. We were happy to oblige them and gave them an overview of the maths behind kinetics as well as some basic Matlab codes that they could use for their system.

Northwestern

The iGEM team at Northwestern worked on OMVs as part of their project, and we had a Skype meeting with them to discuss their applications of OMVs and how these can be used with our system.

EPFL

We met the EPFL iGEM team at the Open Plant Forum where we learned that they were also working towards using a cell-free system. Instead of working in a living system like we did, EPFL worked directly with cell-free lysates for their project, so were willing to have a meeting with us to discuss how they made their lysates and used them giving us a better understanding about how to apply cell-free lysates to our own system.

McMaster II

The McMaster II iGEM team ran molecular dynamic simulations of our system. They simulated the SpyTag/SpyCatcher (ST/SC) interaction in a 300 ns all-atom MD simulation and calculated the root mean square deviation (RMSD) for all residues; this information allowed us to determine the stability of the ST/SC interaction. As we were unable to test the ST/SC interaction in vivo, McMaster’s collaboration was invaluable in helping us assess the functionality of our composite OMV circuit. Please refer to our Design page for the RMSD graph and last few ns of the simulation.

In return, we gave the McMaster advice on how to create a MATLAB scripts for kinetic modeling.

Team:Oxford/Collaborations