Team:UNIFI/Collaborations

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Collaborations

In July, during the Delft meetup we have had the opportunity to get in touch with many different teams from all cross Europe, especially with the team from Center for BioTechnology (Bielefeld). This german team is a veteran of the competition and, since they knew it is the first time for Florence to participate, they kindly offered us a collaboration in the form of a mentorship. They proposed us to Skype once every week to talk about all the aspects of the iGEM, so that we could learn from their expertise, and in fact we can retrospectively say that we knew very little on how to deal with all the tasks before we started the mentorship. We Skyped almost every week from the 17th of July with Christopher, Lennard and Markus and in a few words they opened our minds on how deep and challenging iGEM is, giving us a chance to get fully involved in such challenge. In particular we talked about medal criterias and human practices, two of the hardest tasks, they gave us suggestions on how to organize travel to Boston and, last but not least, they shared with us many useful lab tips, protocols, for example the “magical” Aquacloning, and they helped us solve some of the problems we encountered during our experiments.

Since the beginning we have been very grateful and thankful to the Bielefeld team, and in return for their favour we were able to help them with the characterization of two of their parts. Those two parts consist of two different version of a heterologous transporter (PtNTT2), used by Escherichia coli to take up an unnatural nucleotide, and the N-terminal truncated version without the signal peptide is less toxic for the cell than the complete transporter. Thanks to an automated reader we were able to evaluate the OD600 within a time of 24 hours with measurement every hour, leading to an accurate characterization of those two parts with particular attention to the toxicity of the complete version of PtNTT2. Maximilian has lent us a helping hand to fix some problems we had with the creation of our wiki by giving us many tips in a Skype session and by sending us via wa a very useful guide.

Team Unifi

unifi.igem@gmail.com