Team:Aboa/Collaborations
Collaborations
Due to the close proximity of Aalto-Helsinki and them being the only other team participating from Finland, it was very natural for us to work together closely. Joining forces with Aalto-Helsinki to spread the joy of science made it possible for us to increase the efficiency of our work. For example we made an educational video together about immunoassays for which we wrote the script and they animated it (because we know about diagnostic tools and they have great skills on animation).
In addition to this we also gave Aalto-Heslinki team our Fab for production. This allowed them to experiment in producing therapeutic-like proteins in the chassic Vibrio nartiegens. Combining our resources like this to utilize the individuals' specific skills and knowledge has been a great learning experience and opened many doors for us. We also did synthetic biology laboratory co-operation with the Potsdam team but unfortunately our lab time resources could allow us to fully utilize this possibility.
Contents
Aalto-Helsinki
Since we are the first iGEM team from Turku and have basically no background in this type of work, we desperately needed some mentoring in the beginning. Luckily there was another team from Finland that had already been doing what we were now just starting to do. So thankfully we were able to receive assistance for the massive workload we had in front of us with the ever helpful Aalto Helsinki team during early spring.
We have been working as a hivemind with Aalto-Helsinki for almost the entirety of our time with iGEM. They helped us get started with the whole idea of iGEM. In fact, the very idea of starting our own team here in Turku came up when Aalto-Helsinki team, who competed last year, visited us and told us about their project. The collaboration has been diverse and very productive. We have done all kinds of things together including mentoring (mostly us), human outreach (Biotech theme weeks) and discussions between our team ideas. We even did a small laboratory project together!
You can watch our educational video from HERE!
In addition to collaborations in lab and human outreach, we have been closely in touch with Aalto-Helsinki via email through the whole season. Among other things we have discussed about our trip to Boston and shared some pieces of advice with each other. We also got great ideas for future planning, like how to talk to universities about compensations like credits or even stipends for the time spent on this project, so that is one idea for the future Turku teams. We also heard about their recruiting and time-scheduling systems. Collaborating with Aalto-Helsinki has truly been meaningful. We would've wanted to meet other teams as well and hear about their tips, but unfortunately there was the problem of being a new team with virtually now resources to start with. So as students we didn’t have the resources or the time to travel abroad to meetings at all. Thus for larger co-operations we had to rely on our closest domestic friend, Aalto-Helsinki.
Collaboration with Aalto-Helsinki has been a great addition to our iGEM season. It has been wonderful to get to know them as well, and hope that they have had as much fun working alongside us as we have had working with them!
We met with the iGEM-team from Helsinki!
We were kindly invited to meet our fellow iGEM team from Helsinki at 30th of March. The day started with a road trip with a group of five Aboa team members. We had a so much fun already during the two hour drive via Helsinki-Turku highway. Our driver, Pyry, wasn't that amused when we arrived to the big city.
When we reached Helsinki, our first task was to find Helsinki University library, Kaisa. This took us country dwellers way too much time to find, but we're not fully the one's to blame. The signs were rubbish (with all our love to our sister university) When we finally found AaltoHelsinki team, we had a few presentations about our ideas and then we got precious help from iGEM alumni about what to do and especially what not to do during our journey to Boston. It was cool to hear the project subject of AaltoHelsinki team as well as pitching our own for them.
After the formal stuff was over, we headed to the city for a small sight seeing in the Clarion Hotel sky bar. They had great drinks and we could see the whole city from there! Then we continued to Manala restaurant and had tasty pizza and burgers and got to know each other in a relaxed environment. The late night continued at a bar where we had some more to drink and had a blast. After a long day we stayed at a hotel in the city center for a much needed sleep.
Fanni is enjoying the views at the Clarion Hotel sky bar
-Pyry&Fanni
In mid-August, it was team Aalto-Helsinki’s turn to come to Turku and visit us.
AH’s visit began with us giving them a short tour of our University’s campus. Then, we showed where the magic happens, i.e. our office (where all the hard thinking takes place) and our lab (where all the accidents take place). Each team gave presentations and updates about their respective projects. We also agreed with AH that they would attempt to synthetize our antibody Fab fragment in the bacterium strain they are using.
The evening continued with us relaxing and hanging out in our office; we ate delicious food and tested which team has the smartest people on it by engaging in a very serious battle of Trivial Pursuit (I don’t personally remember who won, but, let’s face it, it was probably team Aboa).
Some of the Aboa and AH team members on the steps to our city’s beautiful church.
The night ended with us going out to town to show the AH team the nightlife of Turku.
All in all, it was an enjoyable weekend for all participants – Turku-people and Helsinki-people alike.
- Fanny
During our second meet in Turku we came up with an idea to test Fab production with Aalto-Helsinki’s Vibrio natrigens . Collaboration with Aalto-Helsinki we checked that plasmids origin of replication and Fab signal sequence are compatible with their Vibrio, so there should not be problems caused by the plasmid itself. We gave our plasmid to Aalto-Helsinki and they did some magic with VibXpresso .
When they were ready, we determined the concentration of Fab from the pellets made by AaltoHelsinki.
Test
- 1:1, 1:10, 1:100 and 1:1000 dilutions in assay buffer were made from the lysed cell pellet received from Aalto-Helsinki team.
- 0.0005 ng/µl, 0.0025 ng/µl, 0.005 ng/µl, 0.025 ng/µl, 0.05 ng/µl and 0.25 ng/µl solutions of standard Fab were made in assay buffer.
- Goat Anti-Human coated 96-well plate was washed once with plate washer. 200 µl of each dilution (of both proteins) and 200 µl of the assay buffer as control were pipetted into wells.
- The plate was incubated at room temperature for 30 minutes.
- The plate was then washed four times with plate washer. 200 µl of 0.25 ng/µl europium chelated 2A11 was added to each well. The 2A11 was also used as a control on its own.
- The plate was incubated for 30 minutes at room temperature.
- The plate was then washed four times with plate washer.
- 200 µl of Delfia enhancement solution was added to each well. The plate was incubated for 10 minutes at room temperature.
- The amount of Fab in each well was measured with time resolved fluorescence.
Results
Due to the low quality of the Goat Anti-Human plates used in the assay, no meaningful answer can be deduced from the data concerning the amount of Fab in the samples. However, the amount of signal coming from samples containing the standard Fab was in the same levels as the signals coming from the lysate samples. Moreover, the signals from the control wells were almost two times smaller than the signals coming from the wells containing samples. In conclusion something is binding and if it is Fabs then the amount of Fabs in the samples is small.
- Ville & Linnea & Jutta
Earlier this autumn the European bioindustry umbrella organisation called EuropaBio hosted an annual European Biotechnology Week that took place from the 23rd to the 29th of September 2019. Our iGEM team participated in organizing the event in collaboration with the iGEM team AaltoHelsinki and hosted a laboratory demonstration in Otaniemi. We started to organize this well in advance and before th H-hour, we had Skype meetings with AaltoHelsinki. In addition, we included an educational video about immunoassays to our Human Outreach collaboration.
You can read the whole story at our Human Practices pages under heading "Biotechnology Week from the 23rd to the 29th of September"
Potsdam
Collaboration with Potsdam team
Potsdam team 2019 was modifying amino acid sequences to be more heat resistant. We sent them a basic digoxigenin Fab amino acid sequence without any non-canonical amino acids, but at the time they were ready with the construct, we had run out of time in our lab and could not use differential scanning fluorometry (DSF) service provided to us by PerkinElmer Turku so it would have been meaningless to just order those gene sequences and not do the proper measurements. Alhough we hope that our proposal of using DSF gave Potsdam an idea how to test their proteins. You can read more about, what Potsdam team was doing from the link below: