Biobrick Tutorial 2017

On Friday of the second weekend of March (9th-11.th of march), DTU BioBuilders stood in anticipation for the first arrival of the invited Nordic iGEM teams

Teams from Norway: Universitetet i Oslo, UiO, Sweden: Chalmers University of Technology , and Denmark: University of Copenhagen, (KU) and University of Southern Denmark, (SDU) marked their presence. Counting 44 people in all made this year’s biobrick tutorial the most attended as of yet.

The purpose of the Biobrick tutorial is to demonstrate the modularity and versatility of the Biobrick beyond on a theoretical level, to socialize and initiate a foundation for further collaboration and to lower the distance between the registry and the members of the respective teams - from teams to start exploring the registry. And to get a clearer idea of the concepts of “Digestion”, “Ligation”, “transformation” and “plate spreading” keeping in mind that the members of the teams have different academic backgrounds and are enrolled in various programs.

Thus, the bulk of the weekend (Saturday) was spent getting hand-on experience with the 3A assembly. This was achieved in the form of a laboratory exercise, where different genetical parts were combined by small teams of four. We achieved this by combining the BioBrick plasmid backbone (pSB1C3) with a purple-blue chromoproteins (RBS-amilCP) under control of a constitutive promoter.

Small lectures was interspersed in between incubation times. Lectures were prepared by us, the team form KU and by invited speakers. These lectures covered technical topics such as cloning techniques: Golden gate and USER cloning, a lecture contributed the supervisors of the iGEM-Copenhagen team - a runthrough of the registry and interactive sessions on communicating science effectively to an audience of peers. A full overview of the interesting events can be found on the bottom of this page.

On Sunday, we arranged for a panel of iGEM alumni and our supervisor to take and answer questions that the teams had. Questions covered topics on funding- and PR activities, judging criterias and team dynamics. This was followed by an activity encouraging ideation in the form of an exercise, where the teams built a bridge between a gap of the tables after brief deliberation among themselves on the design features and load requirements.

We had fun doing this and are handing the baton to the next year’s DTU BioBuilders team to make the Biobrick tutorial 2018, at least as successful as it was this year.

Overview of the Tutorial

	Friday	Saturday	Sunday
Morning	-	Lecture 2: "3A assembly" Lab: Digestion of Biobricks	Lab: Evaluating results
Noon	-	Lunch Lab: Heat activation & ligation	Panel discussion Lunch
Afternoon	Arrival of teams	Lecture 3: "Golden Gate and USER Cloning" Lab: Transformation Lecture 4: "Anatomy of the elevator pitch" Pitching exercise	Lecture 6: "Prototyping" Bridgebuilding: Build your own prototype Awardshow Wrap up and evaluation
Evening	Introduction and safety tour of the laboratories Lecture 1: "What is a BioBrick and the Registry" Dinner and socializing	Lecture 5: "Communicate your message" Lab: Inoculation and plating Dinner & socializing	-

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