iGEM Collaboration
This year we worked closely with the Vanderbilt iGEM team and the University of Maryland College Park iGEM team.
The Vanderbilt team asked us to help them with their Policy and Practices section. Their project concerning ways to minimize random mutation "hot spots" in DNA raised some important questions about the integrity of DNA and a limitation "ceiling" for any such device that helps counter evolution. In return, they offered to cater their kill switch project to make it suitable for our BioBrick. For further steps, we could add their time dependent kill switch as a backup to our concentration dependent kill switch, SacB (BBa_322921), in the event that our negative-selection system does not work as well as planned.
We also attended the iGEM meetup hosted by the University of Maryland College Park. We had a a fun day discussing our projects with the other teams in attendance and also enjoyed listening to talks by the guest speakers. The meetup was a good way to collaborate with other University teams as well as with researchers and government officials already in the field of synthetic biology.