Team:Nottingham/Collaborations



Mentorship &

Collaborations


“In the long history of humankind (and animal kind, too), those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed.”

Charles Darwin



Our first collaboration was with the University of Oxford iGEM team. Their project revolves around creating a probiotic to treat Clostridium dififcile infection in the gut. Their engineered organism will be able to identify C. difficile inside the gut and release an endolysin specific to C. difficile upon detection. Their model relies on detecting AgrD, the autoinducing peptide of the Agr quorum sensing pathway of C. difficile. However, their research centre doesn’t have access to the C. difficile strain that they required.


This is where we offered our help. Our team is based within a centre specialized in working with different strains of Clostridia (including C. difficile!). The SBRC also has a number of leading experts in Clostridia research (our supervisors being some of these experts!). We prepared C. difficile cell and toxin free culture supernatant samples for them. They were able to use our samples as a Agr positive control for their detection system.



The Nottingham University iGEM team attended the UK iGEM meetup, hosted by Newcastle University. This meetup provided invaluable feedback on everything from our presentation design to how we could improve the way our project is communicated to the public. We were also able to hear about the other projects UK teams were working on. During the meetup we made new contacts with the other UK teams and created a number of new collaborations! The meetup also provided a great trial experience for the giant Jamboree in Boston.


Many thanks to the University of Newcastle for hosting!



We initially met the University of Sheffield iGEM team at the UK meetup, where we found out that they are aiming to create an affordable plate reader! With their project being engineering-based, we approached them to ask for their thoughts on the hardware side of our project - the electronic nose. They have advised us on using Fusion 360 instead of Auto-CAD for the design of our casing and have sent us YouTube videos which helped them in learning the software, with the thought that they will help us too. We have used Fusion 360 to design all the 3D printed components in our device.


The Sheffield team also advised to use a NEMA 17 stepper motor in our device. This component would provide the appropriate power balance as well as being the correct size to fit in to our device casing.


We also met up with both the Sheffield and Manchester teams!



We first met the University of Manchester iGEM team at the UK meetup. We also met up with them in Sheffield (with the Sheffield iGEM team) at an arranged social. The Manchester team provided us with a brilliant contact for a mechanical engineer who works on medical injectors (see our human practices section for more info on how he was able to help us with the syringe part of our electronic nose).



Carroll High School iGEM team provide a helpful booklet to teams unsure how to begin their Wiki! We were very interested on providing them with more information and improvements. As our team has a computer scientist, it was decided we would write out a ‘how to’ paragraph on the fundamentals of jQuery. jQuery is the most popular framework for JavaScript development. It simplifies DOM manipulation and offers inbuilt animations functions.


You can find the guide here!