Team:UA Huntsville/Collaborations
Collaborations
University of Alabama
We formed this iGEM team earlier this year full of hope and ambition. There had never been an iGEM team from the state of Alabama, and we were determined to make history. Planning a trip to Boston with only about half a year isn’t easy, and we quickly found ourselves overwhelmed. So, we began looking for nearby teams, and were pleasantly surprised to find that our sister school in Tuscaloosa, the University of Alabama, had also chosen to form their first ever team. So we combined forces to share hotel rooms and plan this trip together. We were even able to share resources and provide a Nissile 1917 strain to the UA Team for their project. Getting to work with the UA team has been a great pleasure, and together we will be the first ever iGEM teams from the state of Alabama.
Cox Laboratory at the University of Wisconsin-Madison
While doing a literature review for the basis of this project, we discovered a paper published by the Cox Laboratory which used directed evolution to engineer a strain of E. coli with boosted resistance to radiation. The IR9-50-1 Strain was generated over the course of 50 generations and exposure to radiation. Different iterations of the experiment developed the same set of mutations in RecN, RecD, and RpoBC significantly boosting radiotolerance in the E. coli. W had originally intended to recreate these mutations using CRISPR, but discovered the nature of the mutations made this incredibly difficult if not impossible, especially on such a short time table. We reached out to the Cox Lab, and they were generous enough to send us a gift of IR9-50-1 strain for use in our experiments, along with the Founder Delta_e14 strain, saving us months of work.
Synthecon
While exploring possibilities for this project, we stumbled upon an old Synthecon microgravity bioreactor stashed away in storage in a lab. It was missing some parts, and needed some work, but it definitely worked. So we emailed Synthecon to help us diagnose the device. To our great pleasure, they offered to send us the replaceable parts free of charge to help support us in our project. We had hoped to be able to test the growth and viability of our cosmicoli in microgravity conditions before the competition, and although we did not get that chance, we are still very appreciative of Synthecon’s contribution. We intend to work with them in the future to test microgravity conditions.