This year, Bordeaux team hosted the French Meet-up with the help of Cap Sciences (Scientific Museum in Bordeaux specialized in scientific popularization) during the last weekend of August (29-30th). We invited all French and francophone teams. Aix-Marseille University iGEM team, Paris_Saclay iGEM team, Pasteur_Paris iGEM team and Toulouse iGEM team came from France, KU_Leuven iGEM team came from Belgium and EPF_Lausanne iGEM team came from Switzerland and all enjoyed the weekend with us.
On Saturday morning, iGEM Bordeaux organized a small orienteering race in the city. The objective was to answer enigmas about synthetic biology and other iGEM projects to find clues for the next location they needed to go to. Divided into three teams, we were able to visit the beautiful city of Bordeaux which ended in a picnic at the Cap Science Museum.
There, teams presented their projects in front of other teams and general public at Cap Sciences and we talked with the audience about the inconvenient and advantages of each project. Each team had to make their presentation understandable for everyone. We also were lucky to have a theatre expert who gave us constructive feedback on the best way to present our projects at Boston and to a non-scientific public.
When every team finished their French presentation, each team made a very quick presentation of their project in English without a PowerPoint, and then again, the public gave some advice for each team.
Look at our first presentation in French with English subtitles down below!
Look at our second presentation in English down below!
After a long day of walk and talk, we went out for dinner in a restaurant and came back to home to have a well-deserved rest to be ready for the Sunday activities.
On Sunday, we all met at the Jardin Public (Bordeaux Park) to do some activities proposed by iGEM Paris_Saclay and iGEM Pasteur_Paris teams. The first one organized a debate about biosafety, and filmed a short video of iGEM team presentation on biosafety for each project. This encouraged all teams to think about safety considerations in their project and allowed us to discuss general safety issues such as containing Genetically Modified Organisms and ensuring that they do not become out of our control.
Afterwards, we had a discussion about Paris Pasteur's project and answered their survey in order to talk about the pollution due to the plastic and help them with their project.
We would like to thank again all of the teams which came to our meetup, Cap Sciences for the loan of their place and for the videos. We also thank all the people who took pictures and videos this week-end and shared them with us.
When talking with Paris-Saclay during our meetup we were very interested in their project this year which is concerned about safety. Safety in our project is not a particular problem since we are using our genetically modified organisms for production and all cells are destroyed during Curdlan purification. However, when thinking about alternatives where our bacteria would be directly applied on grapevine leaves, these safety issues are extremely important. We spent some time with them during the meetup and afterwards thinking about Safety of our project.
In collaboration of IGEM oxford Team we managed to do a toxicity assay of Curldan as we want to use it in vineyards. Our lab does not have the required material to do so and this would help complete our project. So we sent them a sample of our produced Curdlan so they could do tests on it. They decided to test curdlan toxicity on two Bacteria, Rhodobacter sphaeroides and Pseudomonas putida. They choose these bacteria because these two species are very common in the environment so they believe these bacteria represent a good marker for an eventual environmental toxicity. Oxford Wiki
Methods and Materials
Single colonies of wild-type Rhodobacter sphaeroides WS8N and Pseudomonas putida KT2440 were grown in SUX media and Lysogeny Broth respectively overnight to stationary phase at 30°C with orbital shaking at 225 rpm. 1% w/v curdlan in NaOH was made by adding 0.1g of solid curdlan to 10mL of 0.5M NaOH and warming the mixture at 55°C with regular vigorous shaking for 15 minutes to achieve complete dissolution. 100µL of stationary culture was added to 100µL of curdlan-NaOH or NaOH in the wells of a Corning 96-well flat bottom plate, and each condition was repeated in six-plicate. The plate was incubated at 30°C in a FLUOstar Omega Microplate Reader with 200 rpm shaking in between reads, and OD600 was monitored every 15 minutes. The data obtained from each six-plicate was averaged, and error bars were constructed using the standard deviations at each time point.
Conclusions
- 1% curdlan does not appear to present any additional toxicity over the 0.5M NaOH solvent. - Curdlan seems to be not toxic for our markers.
Perspectives
This assay is a good news for us but we have to go deeper into our safety tests. A good way to do that is to test the toxicity of our curdlan on Mammal cells and test a bigger quantity of curdlan (up to 10%)
Throughout the year, we have been contacted to answer surveys and to share surveys. We answered to the best of our abilities all of the following surveys: UI-Indonesian , UCL , TEC-Monterry. When possible we gave feedback to improve their surveys. We also participated to Paris-Bettencourt's rhizi project , which is a good method to connect different iGEM teams and collaborate