Low Budget Challenge by Uniandes Colombia
When doing a synthetic biology project, there are several protocols that must be followed to obtain the wanted results. This protocols can cost a lot of money and most of the time there aren’t the necessary funds available to obtain the best materials and at the same time have the necessary parts to complete the project.
Our low budget proposal consists of two modified techniques: Miniprep and electrophoresis. Both techniques are widely important when doing a project and we chose them because we could prove our Miniprep results in an electrophoresis that is also low budget. When combining both protocols, the amount of money saved can be impressive.
Interteam Collaboration with iGEM Amoy
This year, Amoy team invited us to participate in the newsletter they developed along with Paris_Bettencourt and Pasteur_Paris. We participated along in the discussions about our project, the obstacles we overcome, about science in Mexico and various other topics. The best part of interacting with Amoy team was to see that through communication we can all share our ideas and suggest ways of improving. Here we share the link to the Newsletters: https://2015.igem.org/Team:Amoy/Newsletter
Biosint Queretaro
We reviewed the P&P work of Biosint team, “Ethics for Synthetic Biology, Guidelines for the iGEM Community“. With the help of our instructor, we reviewed their ethic code for the correct implementation of it in Mexico. In this code, they define Synthetic biology and its principles for its implementation in the research field.
Paris Saclay
We contributed with them by participating in their survey about safety and biosecurity of new chassis.
Tec Monterrey Campus Chihuahua Collaboration
We established a collaboration with Tec-Chihuahua team who are working with CNTs. CNTs are cylindrical structures formed by rolled graphite sheets, which are composed by structured carbon atoms rings. These have greater mechanical strength, electrical and thermal conductivity, and chemical and biological activity than graphite. Some authors have demonstrated that DNA can adhere to the CNTs by simple electrostatic interactions between positively charged groups on the surface of the CNTs and the negative charges of the phosphate groups of nucleic acids.
Studies have also shown that the CNTs do not interfere with the mobility of DNA adhered to its surface and have a protective effect against cellular nucleases even after a 60 min digestion, as well as poor enzymatic degradation thereof. So this team used this principle to improve the DNA transformation protocol, increasing the efficiency of it by using DNA attached to CNTs.
Our lab work collaboration will be to perform our transfection protocol using DNA-CNTs complexes (Team Tec-Chihuahua will attach our DNA samples with their CNTs and functionalize them) to transform our Sf9 cells.
We will evaluate the efficiency of transfection using CNTs by electroporation of insect cells and liposomal reagents methods.
