Team:UIUC Illinois/Collaborations

Collaborations

Feel free to browse through the cloning guide.

Golden Gate, Gibson, 3A, Standard Assembly – whenever you want to stitch two or more pieces of DNA together, you have a lot of options! But choosing which option to use for any particular task can be dificult, and that’s just the beginning; while each method has its advantages, they also all come with downsides or potential problems that must be troubleshooted. Thankfully for future iGEM teams, this task just got a little easier with TU_Eindhoven’s Cloning Guide, which was our collaboration project for this season.

We wish we could take credit for this excellent idea, but it was the TU_Eindhoven iGEM team that reached out to us and asked if we could write a chapter of their guide for them. Realizing the benefit of such a guide, we happily agreed!

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Our team was assigned the 3A Assembly method. To complete the guide, we assembled our protocols, wrote an FAQ section, documented our personal experience with the assembly method, researched its history, and weighed the pros and cons of 3A. We also included a couple of diagrams and sources for further reading. To validate our protocol, we successfully used 3A Assembly to combine a yellow chromoprotein from the distribution kit with a promoter and a new backbone.

We checked in several times with TU_Eindhoven throughout the competition season for feedback on the guide’s progress. After incorporating the suggestions, we sent back our final version so that it could be incorporated into the complete guide. Keep an eye out for it to check out our contribution, as well as the sections on the rest of the cloning methods, which were written by other 2015 iGEM teams. It just might make your next cloning protocol go that much smoother!