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Collaborations

SULSA TALKS

In June SULSA (Scottish Universities Life Sciences Alliance) held a conference in Dundee and on the second day, the Scottish iGEM teams had the opportunity to present our project ideas to each other. This was our very first opportunity to pitch our project idea, and it was great to get some feedback from the Edinburgh and Glasgow team as well as find out about their projects.

UK MEET UP

The UK meet up was held by the University of Westminister’s iGEM team. The whole team travelled down to London for this event and presented our project. This was a nice practice before the big event in Boston and a fantastic experience. We chatted with familiar faces from Edinburgh and Glasgow and met some of the other teams from the rest of the UK.

AALTO-HELSINKI

Near the start of the summer the Aalto-Helsinki team got in touch with us and we arranged to chat over skype. We described our projects to each other and discussed different methods for modelling enzyme kinetics.

BIELEFELD-CEBITEC

We collaborated with team Bielefeld-CeBiTec who are also constructing a chromate sensor based on the chromate resistance operon of Ochrbrobactrum tritici 5bvl1. However, we are using the part in very different contexts and configurations. Team Bielefeld is using a chromate sensor to detect the contamination of drinking water, whereas we using it to detect traces of stainless steel. This opened the door for our collaboration. We shared our results and exchanged our constructs so that we could also test the other’s systems. They helped characterise our chromium sensor by testing our codon optimized sensor in their in vitro system for cell-free protein synthesis.

AIX-MARSAILLE

We answered some questions that the Aix-Marseille team had regarding the twin-arginine translocation (Tat) pathway. They wanted to know whether we thought it would be possible to transport something with a tat signal linked to something else with a secretory pathway (Sec) signal together through the Tat system. Using knowledge from Tracy Palmers lab at the university, we were able to advise them that this approach is unlikely to work and offered an alternative approach to try.

UCSF

We added our introductory video to iGEM WikiFlicks – a platform made by the UCSF team for sharing videos about the projects.

SURVEYS

We completed a survey by SDU-Denmark about antibody production and use of animals in research. We also answered Paris-Saclay’s survey about biosafety.