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Revision as of 15:58, 18 September 2015

Collaborations

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Trinity College Dublin & University College London

This year Cork iGEM has collaborated with both Trinity College Dublin and University College London iGEM teams. The Basehunter system was put together in an anonymous way, so that the teams would not see what reagents were present or absent in order to avoid influencing the results. Cork iGEM put together tubes containing mastermixes and labelled them using unbiased characters such as A,B and C, they were sent via post. The iGEM teams agreed to test the systems.

The aim of this collaboration was to investigate if the Basehunter system could be both easily transported and explained with a protocol. A written protocol and a video protocol were prepared. The video protocol can be seen HERE INSERT LINK.

Trinity tested the system and these were the results obtained in the blind testing; Sent to the team were 6 tubes containing the HPV 55bp Detector. Tubes 1-3 were to be positive controls, while tubes 4-6 were to be negative. This was not disclosed to the experimenting team at TCD.

Feedback from the team was positive as they reported - “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.”

These results showed that the detector could be posted to other labs and protocols simply followed using common materials already in the lab. In addition, results achieved were consistent with those obtained in our lab at UCC. See figures 1 and 2 for results reported by TCD.

Also, to assist TCD, we researched into the possibility of constructing a detector to detect artemisinin resistance in species of plasmodium falciparum, the parasite that causes malaria. TCD informed us that this is a significant problem in areas where malaria is endemic, as usually the most widely used treatment for malaria is artemisinin. Between the two teams, we found that the most common mutations that confer resistance are SNP’s on the Kelch 13 propellor (Haldar et al., 2015) . The mutations are point mutations, single base changes. Our detector was not sensitive or specific enough to pick up these small changes.

References:

Haldar, K. et. al, April 2015, “A molecular mechanism of artemisinin resistance in Plasmodium falciparum malaria”, Nature, 520, 683–687