Testing Water Samples From Around the World

As our project aims to develop a product to remove phosphate out of wastewater, we chose to test water samples from around the world for phosphate concentration. We would like to thank the iGEM teams- TU Eindhoven, Technion Israel and Leuven for their water samples! We also received water samples from Derby, Egypt, Yorkshire and Manchester.

Methods

200uL of all drinking water samples were pipetted directly in to the 96 well plate. All river water and bog water samples were filter sterilised to remove solid particles before 200uL of each sample was plated. A set of phosphate standards were prepared and 30uL of dye was then added before the plate was left to equilibrate for 30 minutes in the dark. Following equilibration, the optical density of each well was read at 650nm using a plate reader. The concentration of phosphate in each sample well could then be determined using the equation of the standard curve.

Figure 1: Standard curve generated using standards made following the ABCAM (ab65622) protocol.

Results

Cloning assembly guide

At the beginning of the summer, TU Eindhoven reached out and asked iGEM teams around the world about which DNA assembly methods they were using. They have put together a cloning guide using information sent from 13 teams, one of which was us! We wrote them a detailed description of our gibson assembly techniques. Check out their guide below and see what they worked on here.