Team:IISER Bhopal/Collaborations

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Collaborations

All India iGEM Meet

This year, we were the proud hosts for the All India iGEM Meet 2019 - that too, during just our second year in the competition!

The gala event ran from 20th to 21st July, and was a delightful success, featuring an active participation and committed engagement from almost all the Indian iGEM teams. It was a fun-filled two day spectacle - who said biology didn’t come with its share of razzmatazz? We had numerous sessions, with all the teams taking the stage to share their ideas, getting up-to-date on each others’ projects, followed by ultra-productive brainstorming sessions.

This year's meet was judged by iGEM’s Asia Ambassador Nurul Izzati, IICE’s CEO Dr. Amjad Hussain, Dr. Abhishek Cukkemane and our guest of honour Dr. Bharat Prithviraj.

The Colony Picking Project: Team Marburg

Modern problems require modern solutions.

And that spirit is exactly what Team Marburg embodied this year when they announced they were preparing scripts and modules that would allow other iGEM teams to transform their OT-2 into colony picking robots. The core of this innovation? What else but the tech’s world latest darling - Artificial Intelligence!

AI, of course, needs to be trained with data. And once we were done being bowled over by Marburg’s cool idea, we pitched in with the data they needed.

We submitted pictures of agar plates with colonies of E. coli to help train the AI to recognise these. And on a sweet note, we are happy to announce that Team IISER Bhopal ended up submitting the most number of plates - for which we won a prize as well!

iGEM Instagram Challenge: Team Stony Brook

To beat the summer heat, iGEM Stony Brook came up with a pretty funky instagram challenge. It involved posting pictures on our team’s official instagram page in tune with the theme of the day. The challenge, lasting one week, provided us a much needed break from the heavy lab work and encouraged us to tap into our creative sides, all the while increasing our social media presence!

Team IISER Pune: Water water everywhere, but not a drop to drink.

Team IISER Pune are working this year on a rather interesting alternative tool for directed evolution, such that the process may be performed faster and more conveniently. The tool’s supposed to be a mutagenic plasmid that can attain tunability of mutation rates in E. coli using blue light as an external physical inducer. As a proof of principle, the team wanted to test its performance by evolving a heavy metal remediating gene to higher efficiency. They chose Lead, as studies showed that Lead pollution was of the highest concern in one of the local rivers in Pune. For this, they decided that it was a good idea to analyze samples taken from water bodies across the country to get an idea of the lead pollution levels across a broader sample space. We provided Team IISER Pune with water samples to test lead contamination for this purpose.

Team IISER Tirupati: an mCHERRY on top

Our team was facing a few hurdles in the expression of one of the biobricks - the stress sensor (BBa_K639003). IISER Tirupati helped us out by transforming the aforementioned part and inducing the said sensor at nutritional stress conditions. The reporter in this assay was mCHERRY, and they very kindly sent us a quantitative analysis for the data of the same. In turn, we helped them prepare samples for imaging FimB overexpressed bacteria. The samples were imaged through TEM and SEM imaging by Dr. Vikas Jain's laboratory at IISER Bhopal, though the results were negative for fimbrial expression. Because of these results, IISER Tirupati instead went with FimE KO strains. However, due to time constraints / technical errors, IISER Tirupati weren't able to image those properly.

@iGEM IISERB