Visit to Biocon R&D Facility
Near the end of June, we were planning on using gas vesicles to simplify recombinant protein purification. To understand this problem better — and direct our project focus toward solving it — we visited Biocon, India's largest pharmaceutical company.
Biocon's R&D park, located in Bangalore, hosted four members of our team who toured the facility and spoke to the Manager of the R&D division to understand how industrial recombinant protein synthesis works. Topics discussed ranged widely, from the choice of expression system — E. coli, Pichia pastoris, CHO cells — to the choice of growth medium for the microbes.
The most important takeaway from this industrial visit was the importance of scale: any novel idea that functions perfectly in a lab need not work even passably on an industrial scale! This visit to Biocon sparked our interest in industrial processes, leading to a more fruitful collaboration with industry that turned our project in an entirely different direction...
iGEM India Meetup
GCODe Mini Assembly
Our iGEM Hardware Outreach involved talking to professor, PhD students, undergraduates and random IISc visitors across field ranging from optics to electronics to pathology. We learned many useful things, some of which appear on our Hardware Evolution page and understood what a difference GCODe would make.
Once we were done writing up the documentation for the GCODe Mini, we needed to know how easy it would be for someone else to build. Sure, the documentation looked complete to us, but that's because we already knew how to build it! There would definitely be lots of little things that seemed obvious to us, but would leave anyone else confused. There was only one way to find out - make someone build it! We invited Arpit Behera, a college freshman at IISc, to build the Mini from the instructions you see on the wiki.
We gave Arpit all the parts he needed, laser-cut and soldered, and a link to our Construction Manual.
He managed to build the GCODe Mini in less than two hours!
Although this was extremely gratifying, Arpit did have lots of feedback for us on where he found the manual difficult to understand, and which parts could be improved further. This helped us make the manual for the Mini much more comprehensive and user-friendly.
Assembling a device of this complexity is always a tedious and frustrating task, but the Mini Construction Manual made it a lot easier. Getting to use the revised version would have been even better! - Arpit