Team:TrinityCollegeDublin/CorkiGEM
Cork iGEM
In late July, we hosted the first meet-up in Ireland with some members from the Cork iGEM coming up to Dublin for a day.
The day started off in Trinity’s Global Room where we provided tea, coffee and biscuits as well as bananas as a healthy alternative to the visitors. Here, we got to discuss how both our respective projects were progressing and also possible ideas for collaborating. Since we are new to iGEM this year, it was also interesting to hear Cork’s experiences at the previous year’s Giant Jamboree in Boston.
After the discussions, Cork iGEM got to see the Book of Kells and the Library before a quiet evening meeting in one of Dublin’s pubs. It was an enjoyable experience to have a fellow Irish team over for a visit. We look forward to seeing them again soon at the Jamboree in Boston as well as meeting fellow iGEM teams from around the world.
For our collaboration, we decided to test out their Basehunter system in order to validate it and possibly debug their construct. It required a Basehunter detector reaction, and transformation into competent cells. We were sent a number of tubes along with a clear set of protocols to test out the experiment in a blind trial to avoid any bias.
As it turned out, their system worked perfectly and the results we achieved were as expected.
Following is our email that we sent back to them comprising of the result data as well as feedback comments:
After the discussions, Cork iGEM got to see the Book of Kells and the Library before a quiet evening meeting in one of Dublin’s pubs. It was an enjoyable experience to have a fellow Irish team over for a visit. We look forward to seeing them again soon at the Jamboree in Boston as well as meeting fellow iGEM teams from around the world.
For our collaboration, we decided to test out their Basehunter system in order to validate it and possibly debug their construct. It required a Basehunter detector reaction, and transformation into competent cells. We were sent a number of tubes along with a clear set of protocols to test out the experiment in a blind trial to avoid any bias.
As it turned out, their system worked perfectly and the results we achieved were as expected.
Following is our email that we sent back to them comprising of the result data as well as feedback comments:
Dear Cork iGEM team,
We tested out the Basehunter system as requested.
The Protocols were very clear indeed and easy to follow, and it helped greatly that there was an alternative to using the PCR machine when incubating the coloured tubes.
It is to be noted however, that we couldn’t get an exact temperature of 10°C in our slushy ice bath and it ranged from around 7° to 10°. This didn’t seem to affect the final results. Moreover, for the counting of the colonies we left the plates in the incubator for a total of 42 hours to let them grow. (After 18 hours even though the colonies were fluorescing, they weren’t big enough to be counted clearly.)
We hope the results we got are what you expected.
TCD iGEM