Team:Austin UTexas/Mina
Collaborations
Collaborations Achievements
In order to fulfill the medal requirements, build a friendship with other iGEM teams, and to test our the reproducibility of our protocols, we collaborated with the
Our collaboration goals were to serve other teams by using our burden monitor to measure the burden of the genetic constructs they were using from the iGEM kit. In doing so we were able to characterize the parts they used from the iGEM kit as burdensome or not relative to our controls. Furthermore, the other teams helped us by troubleshooting our burden monitor protocol. This includes making the burden monitor strain, and running our assay on a series of parts and comparing our data to then determine if our protocol is reproducible across other labs or not. The achievements done by our team's collaborations has helped us understand how to improve our protocol so that it is more clear and easy to follow so that the results from our assay are indeed reproducible. This progress will help future iGEM teams know how to measure burden of the genetic constructs that they use and compare which parts are more burdensome than others.
Meet up and Mentoring UT Arlington
Noor and Jordan with Morgan from UT Arlington
Early in the summer we were able to host a small meet up with UT Arlington and talk about each team’s project. This helped us find unique ways to collaborate with them. It is UT Arlington’s first year competing in iGEM. As an older iGEM team we were able to
On our campus we hosted a Fall Undergraduate Research Symposium (FURS) and a member from our team and UT Arlington gave a talk over each respective teams iGEM project. This allowed each team to gain experience with presenting their iGEM project. We were also able to connect with UT Arlington and talk more about each others' projects. Being able to have meet ups with UT Arlington was great to learn about how a new team is set up and develop a relationship for collaborations in the future.
TX iGEM Meet up with Rice and Texas Tech
We were able to contact the Rice and Texas Tech teams early in the summer because we have collaborated with them in the past. It was very helpful to have past relationships with these teams and build on our collaboration interests. Because of early contact we were able to host a Texas iGEM meet up with these teams. At our meet up we were able to learn about each teams projects and give a rough presentation. It was exciting to see the experience and progress other teams have made. Our meet up was helpful to find ways to collaborate with other teams and improve our presentation skills to prepare for the Jamboree.
Meet up with Rice and Texas Tech!
Working with Rice and Texas Tech we were able to serve them by running our burden assay on the parts that they used from the iGEM kit. Doing this benefited these teams by giving them data to help characterize their part and how it effects the growth rate and evolutionary stability of the cell. The data collected is not only useful to our three teams but also for other iGEM teams who plan on using those parts in the future and inspire them to think more about evolutionary stability and cellular resources. Outside of us running our assay on these teams parts we were also fortunate to receive help from Texas Tech to determine whether or not our experiments are reproducible. They were able to help us a lot by trouble shooting some of our protocols for us. This included following our protocols for creating the burden monitor as well as the calibration strains that we use. They then ran our burden assay on these strains. This helps us know whether or not our calibration strains and the line of regression is consistent across labs. Having four Texas teams helped our collaborative efforts greatly. Our collaborations were able to be carried out so smoothly because of our opportunity to host a meet up. Being able to spend a day with other teams helps us communicate ideas and learn from each other a lot more than a video call would.
Reproducibility With Michigan State
Our team was able to receive joint funding with Michigan State University iGEM through the NSF Beacon Center. Our PI, Jeff Barrick also has a good relationship with the MSU PI Daniel Ducat. This enabled us to be able to be in contact early and often through out the summer. Early collaborative ideas helped our project development in terms of reproducibility and being able to communicate with others the importance of our project. MSU helped us by troubleshooting our protocol by growing our burden monitor and calibration strains. Once this was successful we had enough data to determine a series of "interesting parts" that we wanted to use as "reproducible data set". These parts were considered "interesting" because of their growth rates and GFP expression relative to our calibration strains were a wide variety of values. Some parts imposed no burden to the cell while others affected the cell via translational burden or other toxicity. This reproducible data set gave us more information and feedback on whiter or not our burden monitor assay is reproducible by other labs and could possibly be standardized in the future. The troubleshooting Michigan State did for is very beneficial for the future of our project and the possibility of it being standardized, and easily understood across iGEM and Synthetic Biology.