Difference between revisions of "Team:Manchester-Graz"

Manchester-Graz: the first inter-European iGEM team

Team Graz

Due to existing collaboration between our universities in several research programs, such as CHEM21 (a European research project), we were brought together by our respective professors Sabine Fitsch and Anton Glieder. For the Austrian team it is a chance to enter the competition for the first time with the support of the students from Manchester who have previous experience with iGEM. Once the joint team was formed, weekly Skype meetings were held to agree on a project, taking advantage of the collaboration to cover a wider area of research than would be possible as individuals. We find working together as an international team challenging, the distance required us to find a topic that could be worked on independently whilst still achieving common goal. Overcoming this coupled with the exchange of knowledge and experience between the sub-teams however makes working on this project all the more rewarding.

Team Manchester

Our idea emerged from the different fields of interest of the students in Graz and Manchester, with the former wanting to generate a regulation system for protein synthesis, and the latter being more focused on medical aspects such as the synthesis of a drug. The result was a quorum sensing based system for the autonomous production of L-DOPA and dopamine, with the students in Manchester working on the synthesis of L-DOPA and the students in Graz setting up an expression system that allows autonomous induction of several target genes. Using the advantage of two teams we can apply the L-DOPA pathway directly in a new system, which can already be evaluated in a real world context.

There are also numerous advantages for our team outside the science. Public outreach and human practices are more efficiently conducted across the two countries and yield more interesting data. Different attitudes towards synthetic biology and modern biotechnology can be determined on an international scale, in Austria and the United Kingdom respectively. In addition, the potential to gain valuable knowledge from interviews with experts in industry, medicine and patient care are greatly broadened as is the possibility for raising awareness about Parkinson’s and synthetic biology.