Amsterdam

Amsterdam is our most significant collaboration. We skyped together early in the summer and realized that both of our projects had an important connection. Amsterdam iGEM team worked on making E.coli to produce Fumarate, which reduces methane emissions in cattle when fed in certain doses. As a result, UNL iGEM team and the Amsterdam iGEM team joined forces to come up with a way to reduce methane emissions. Methane emissions have a huge impact on climate change. iGEM team UNL and iGEM team Amsterdam explored the possibilities of feeding fumarate to cattle, in order to reduce methane emissions. We can conclude that fumarate seems a promising molecule for this application. However, since the literature about the possible effect of fumarate is not consistent, the physiology of cattle opposes some challenges and the maximum fumarate yields in certain organisms under our specific conditions are not yet defined. Actual empirical research must show if this promising route can lead to lower methane emissions and a more sustainable world! The result of our collaboration is shown below.

Methungeny

We collaborated with Methungeny about safety cases and general research questions. They posed us a question about their experiment and we gave them suggestions on how they could solve their problem. Methungeny’s project aim is to develop a methane biosensor medium which consists of methane-utilizing bacteria and an enzymatic assay. When methane is present in the environment of the bacteria, they will produce lactate which will be converted to a colorful substance by the assay kit. The bacterium they chose to perform the methane to lactate conversion is the Methylococcus capsulatus. Normally, it does not produce lactate that's why they are going to insert a gene of the lactate-dehydrogenase (LDH) enzyme in it, which is able to transform pyruvate to lactate. Since this bacterium is a thermotolerant organism they thought it would be worth using the LDH of another thermotolerant bacterium, so the LDH gene is originated from Bacillus coagulans. They will put this gene into a vector designed especially for Methylococcus capsulatus, but at this point they had faced a problem. They were searching for an appropriate constitutive promoter which would be able to drive the LDH gene but they had not found an exact promoter sequence. They asked us if we could help them find a promoter which could be used in Methylococcus capsulatus? The UNL iGEM Team did some research and gave them some suggestions on which promoter they could use. We suggested that Methylococcus capsulatus'  primary sigma factor for exponential growth (RpoD) is very similar to E. coli's RpoD, especially the DNA binding region.  So we believe an Anderson promoter will be sufficient for their purpose. In the spirit of iGEM we sent them a link to Anderson promoters already cataloged in the registry. (http://parts.igem.org/Promoters/Catalog/Anderson).

In return they helped us with our safety page section. Our team has designed a new idea called safety cases to help with safety in the iGEM world. We asked them for help critiquing our explanation of the safety cases and also our general safety information. They promptly responded with many helpful suggestions seen below.

“We missed a "Safety measures in a molecular biology laboratory" part what describes the biosafety dress code (the need of wearing gloves, goggles, lab coats etc.). In our opinion, it would be also essential to mention the separate collection of disposable materials (e.g.: pipette tips, Eppendorf tubes and inoculating loops connecting with microorganisms). Writing about the chemicals’ material safety data sheet (MSDS) and important safety pictograms found on the bottles and flasks would be also very useful because they are a basic part of biosafety and so that everybody not just biologists can understand the meaning of the figures found on each material in a laboratory. We also recommend to write about the biosafety risk group of the used bacteria before and after the genetic modification (BSL1 and S1). You should write some sentences about the biosafety laws of your country and institution and mention that your team meet all the requirements. They may seem very basic aspects but we think you had better write about them to make sure about nothing will miss from the safety cases. In conclusion, we think, your safety part is a well-written, comprehensive, professional work. Congratulate!”

Survey

This is our collaboration badge that we presented to all the teams that participated in our survey (results found HERE). Here is a map marking all the teams!