Collaborations
Road to collaborations
Since we were the first iGEM team from our University, we had many challenges to overcome that a regular team didn’t have to worry about a lot.
Having people around that have participated in iGEM before and know a lot about the general iGEM workflow are thus an invaluable asset to the team.
Early on in the competition, on the third of May, we went to the IGEM Spring Festival in Bonn to attend their big meetup, talk to other teams and figure out where we stand compared to other teams.
When we were in the middle of our project however we wanted to get more information about topics we weren’t so sure about: Integrated human practices and the registry.
Hosting the first Swiss iGEM Meetup
So we reached out to the team of the ETH Zurich and the EPFL Lausanne to organize the first swiss iGEM meetup! The swiss iGEM community used to be just ETH and EPFL, but this year we joined the fray, along with the team from geneva which, unfortunately, could not participate in the meetup.
The point of the meetup was first, to exchange thoughts and advice about all our projects, see what others are doing and how it is going for them. Second, the ETH team gave a presentation about “How to do integrated human practices” while the EPFL gave a talk about how the registry works which included tips & tricks as well as potential pitfalls and workarounds.
Both presentations were very helpful to us. After the talks we took some pictures, continued talking at the campus bar and after a lengthy dinner the meetup was finished.
We did want to take more out of the meetup, so beforehand, it was decided that our team would send the draft for the wiki page “integrated human practices” to the ETH team for review. We took the same approach with our most used part and sent the part description on the registry to the EPFL team first to discuss it with them.
Both of their insights and comments helped us to improve the wiki pages from the draft and we are very grateful for that.
Here a group picture of Team UZurich, ETH Zurich and EPFL Lausanne, thanks guys it was a lot of fun and see you in Boston!!
Reproducibility
From early on it was our idea to have another iGEM team replicating our findings, not only because reproducibility in science is a very hot topic at the moment but also to show that our claim in the Human practice section, namely the organisms we use being easy to work with, is true.
When we were having technical problems with our microscope and it needed to be repaired, the Warwick team offered us through our mentor Jack Lawrence to do some more imaging of our genes. It was the perfect opportunity and therefore we sent them a couple of our sequencing confirmed plasmids, which is really easy to do.
Even sending transformed Pseudomonas bacteria to them for imaging was not that big of a hustle since the bacteria are classified as risk group 1 organisms.
The images we received from Team Warwick showed that YFP signal was detectable, although it still seemed rather weak. This showed us that our problems with the YFP may have been due to our microscope and not due to our project design. It is possible that the YFP signal was too low for detection on our microscope.
They additionally hypothesized that the substantial amount of background fluorescence they experienced may have come from lysed cells and the aggregated proteins visible from time to time may support our findings of these proteins are structurally involved in the compartment.
There were no infections detectable in their images so we could not use them to support our findings of the localizations of the respective proteins.
The cells visualized here were transformed with a plasmid expressing YFP-gp105. It is visible that the protein is produced and uniformly spread in uninfected cells. Note that we visualized the YFP signal in green, this was done because yellow coloring was harder to see on these images.
Visit the iGEM collab site of the Warwick team here .
We would not only like to thank the Warwick team for taking time to confirm our results as well as Jack Lawrence for coordinating, but also Chris Corre, their supervisor, Rebecca Allen, who helped with safety forms, and Ian Hands-Portman, who was responsible for the imaging suite and generously found time for the Warwick team.
Visit the iGEM collab site of the Warwick team here .
We would not only like to thank the Warwick team for taking time to confirm our results as well as Jack Lawrence for coordinating, but also Chris Corre, their supervisor, Rebecca Allen, who helped with safety forms, and Ian Hands-Portman, who was responsible for the imaging suite and generously found time for the Warwick team.