Biologic Orthogonal GRNA-Implemented Circuit

In science, and in the field of synthetic biology in particular, characterizing new devices turns out to be as important as conceiving them. This not only provides a “how to use” guide for future users of your part but also allows the discovery of biologically relevant information about how it functions. When it comes to iGEM, the importance of characterization reaches huge proportion since thousands of new parts are registered each year. As a matter of fact, last year the competition launched its first InterLab Study, inviting every participating team to collaborate to measure previously existing devices. In addition to providing robust and statistically useful data, the InterLab Study aims at assessing how those measurements vary between labs. How similar are data from two teams using the same protocol? How well are the ratios conserved using two different measurement equipment? This year, these questions will be answered for the three constructs each team was given. They each contained a promoter from the widely used Anderson promoter collection that controlled the expression of a GFP. Each construct is described below. We contributed this year by measuring the three constructs in biological triplicates with a flow cytometer, which allowed us to assess the cell-to-cell variability of our samples. As part of the extra-credit assignment, we also provided technical triplicates of our data, thus determining the precision of the measurements.