Team:ETH Zurich/Collaborations
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Collaborations
One of the biggest opportunities in iGEM is the contact and collaboration between teams of different backgrounds, which makes it possible to get input from various points of views and to establish a network of young scientist with the same interests. We took advantage of this opportunity and established contacts to teams from several continents.
Stockholm
Starting from the very beginning of our iGEM summer we were in continuous contact with the team from Stockholm. We realized soon that our projects were going into a similar direction, both focusing on cancer detection in samples of bodily fluids, using engineered bacteria that will bind to cancer cells. In contrast to our project, Stockholm’s ABBBA is focussed on the detection of one specific type of cancer at a time. In several Skype meetings we exchanged our ideas about the best possible setup for single cell analysis and signal integration of the bacteria upon binding to a cancer cell. We provided the team from Stockholm with inputs on microfluidics as a setup for the final analysis and they helped us when we were struggling with the recovery of our gene fragments. But what seemed to be the best opportunity for combining our forces was the rather extensive experience in mammalian cell culture and bacterial-mammalian coculture our team had gathered in the course of our project. Since the team of Stockholm did not have the opportunity to test their system in such a real-life system, we decided to validate their system by combining their engineered E. coli cells with their actual targets: HER2-positive breast cancer cells.
Validation of ABBBA binding to cancer cells
We characterized the system of Stockholm regarding the binding of their bacteria to HER2-positive breast cancer cells. The affibody based system explored by the Stockholm iGEM team is designed to make engineered E. coli cells bind to cancer cells expressing the targeted surface marker. In the tested case of HER2-positive breast cancer, the team came up with three chimeric receptors, targeting different epitopes of the HER2 extracellular domain. We tested the binding of ABBBA E. coli expressing the respective constructs to HER2+ XXXX cells.
For better observation of colocalization of the bacteria and the mammalian cells we introduced a second plasmid carrying a constitutively expressed fluorophore (GFP?) into the bacterial strains that we received from Stockholm. We characterized the interaction of bacteria and mammalian cells after (link 2x) spheroblast and coculture protocols by (confocal) microscopy (and maybe FACS). The spheroblast protocol is necessary since the affibody construct is localized in the inner membrane of E. coli and has to be revealed by removal of the outer membrane.
Results
tbd
Characterization of lldR-operator promoter collection
In exchange, Stockholm agreed to characterize a big party of our synthetically designed lldR-operator promoters for us. They probed our engineered bacteria, containing a green fluorescent protein under the control of lldR along with constantly expressed lldR with or without lldP, for their reaction to different levels of L-Lactate, thereby greatly contributing to the characterization of our (link)promoter collection.
Amoy
We collaborated with Amoy team by contributing to their newsletter. We have written about the selection process for iGEM in the No1 issue and participated in the questionnaire about the most useful software for us in No6 issue. We also published a description of our project in No3 issue, an update in issue No5 and abour our human practices in issue No7. Finally, we made a short assay about the situation of synthetic biology in Switzerland for the Special issue and about the ethical dilemmas of editing a human embryo for the No2 issue.
Darmstadt
On their southern Germany tour, representatives of the TU_Darmstadt iGEM team visited several German, Swiss, and Italian teams (link?). We were lucky to host them for a weekend in Zurich and Basel, where we showed them our lab and our city. We were talking a lot about our projects which was a great opportunity to find out how someone completely unrelated to our idea would react to it, and vice versa.
Next to this, TU_Darmstadt also introduced us to their Lab Surfing platform (link), which our team tested for them and was able to come up with a lot of inputs to improve the user interface for this great idea. The result of the TU_Darmstadt Lab Surfing project can be found here(link).
EPFL
Since both Swiss Federal Institutes of Technology, ETH Zurich and EPF Lausanne, are hosting an iGEM team in 2015, we were of course eager to find out what our colleagues in Lausanne were working on. We invited their team to our lab where we were able to test our presentations on each other and get useful inputs on how to improve them.
At this opportunity, we set up a survey on the public opinion and awarweness on synthetic biology, which they conducted in Lausanne and together we went out to the people in Basel to find out about their position in this field.
It is important to us to spread pulic awareness on the rapidly rising field of synthetic biology. In our survey, we found this to be very important as well, since most of the people we asked had either not herad about synthetic biology before or, if yes, they did not feel infomred enough. It seems that still, the idea of genetically modified organisms is something that causes a lot of malcomfort in many people. You can find out more about the results of our survey on our Awareness page.
Colombia
We helped Colombia when their transformations didn't work and exchanged ideas with them. We provided their team with protocols, as well as papers on python to help them with their modelling.
We would like to thank our sponsors
