Team:TecMonterrey GDL/Collaborations
As part of these competition, one of our favorite activities in iGEM have been collaborations. They made us see that iGEM is not only a contest but a chance to let other teams be a part of our project.
1
Tec Chihuahua
Mentorship
One of our crucial collaborations was developed with Tec-Chihuahua. This teamwork was born when Joel Hernandez (Tec-Chihuahua iGEM team advisor) met our advisor Cristina Figueroa at Harvard Medical School while they working as research trainees.
Thanks to the support between the teams we could achieve the construction of our BioBricks. Since the beginning, communication was fundamental. We started having some problems with the design and logic of our constructs, so we took this as a great opportunity to learn from others that had more experience in this area. Basically, the problem showed up when we could not build our BioBricks because they were missing some base pairs.
For the construct pOmpC-TRZ 1-iLOV (BBa_K3149001), we found out that our oligos were missing base pairs before the suffix and after the prefix, affecting the correct function of the restriction enzymes during ligation. Also, Tec-Chihuahua suggested the addition of a green reporter that could be useful for further analysis data. Moreover, with the help of both teams, we designed primers to add them to the prefix and suffix, thus amplifying the genes and allowing a correct digestion and ligation.
On the other hand, we talked about the importance of producing TRZ1 for our hypothesis and characterization. That is where Joel and Cristina figured out a way of modulating the synthesis of TRZ1 and incorporated an arabinose-inducible pBAD strong promoter for the construct pBAD-TRZ1 (BBa_K3149000). At a given level of arabinose input, BBa_K206000 will provide a higher level of PoPS output than its family members, allowing analog device responses.
Thanks to the support we received from our advisors we managed to answer our doubts regarding the design of the parts necessary to develop our project.
Our team kept in touch with the Tec-Chihuahua team throughout the duration of this project, constantly sharing our progress in the lab. To standardize the experiments corresponding to our respective projects, Tec-Chihuahua sent us a summary with information about the protocols they had already established. One of the protocols they shared with us was a methodology for an SDS-PAGE. This protocol is routinely used for BioBrick characterization, which helped us save time during our experiments related to protein induction and detection.
To replicate their experiments, Tec-Chihuahua shared with us the following reagents: Isopropyl β-D-thiogalactopyranoside (IPTG, Invitrogen) and bisacrylamide, as well as their chassis of E. coli BL21 (DE3) without transformation and their chassis of E. coli BL21 (DE3) transformed with its BioBrick [BBa_K2959010] for the expression of Arabidopsis thaliana Profilin 1. This allowed us to accurately replicate the protocol to help them standardize their methodology.
Although thanks to Chihuahua’s mentorship we were able to successfully recreate their results with total protein extraction and polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis, we weren’t able to efficiently induce the expression of their BioBrick. Nevertheless, we were able to discuss the results and concluded that the protocol can be easily adapted in our further experiments.
2
Tec Monterrey
Troubleshooting
During our collaboration with the Tec-Monterrey team, we helped each other solve specific issues in a variety of areas including but not limited to Human Practices and laboratory work. We were able to contact them through their Facebook page, where while reading it we discovered the similarities between our projects and realized that they could help us solve several of our issues and doubts, especially those regarding laboratory work.
The first order of business after realizing the potential of us working together was getting to know both their team and their project on a more personal level, to this end, a video-meeting was scheduled during which we told them about the problems we were having with our ligation protocols, and they offered help sharing theirs. Of note is that alongside their protocol they shared notes with suggestions to further improve ligation effectiveness.
Afterwards we offered our help to design their Human Practices projects since their focus too was in education, specifically, inclusive education for people who suffer from visual impairments. Given the similarity in our Human Practices projects we were able to help them design an effective educational model that they could use.
Tec-Monterrey’s project (Breathe-in), is an attempt at developing a new innovative methodology for the development of multisensorial resources that can be used in teaching. Building on the Universal Design for Learning (UDL) approach they were able to develop prototype models that facilitate learning for visually impaired individuals. Because this approach can be applied in a variety of contexts, we decided to include it in our Human Practices approach to allow visually impaired children to take part in the planned activities.
