Difference between revisions of "Team:Marburg/Measurement"

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                Light measurement:
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                At a very early stage of our project we noticed that standardization in the phototrophic community needs to have an overhaul to allow for reproducible experiments. As we started doing growth curves we used to determine the light intensity via a planar quantum sensor that can only absorb photons from an angle of approximately 120° and only counts photons having a wavelength between 400nm-700nm. Because of the way we setup our incubator the illumination was coming from two different light sources, which needed to be measured individually. While our first attempts included measuring the intensity by facing the quantum sensor at the lights respectively and then converting these values by a factor accounting for spherical flux of light. We then came up with the idea to search for a scalar radiometer that has a detection surface of nearly 4π steradian, can only measures photosynthetic active radiation.  With the help of this method we used to determine the exact amount of  µmol photonsm2s that can be used  for photosynthesis. (400nm-700nm).
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                 After we determined the light intensity via this method the doubling time of our strain drastically reduced. Doubling times from two hours we had before were now beaten and we achieved new lows of about 90 mins for the first time.
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                 We believe that the standardization of measuring light intensity has a huge impact in the field of phototrophic biology. What we often time stumbled upon when we were looking for literature on our iGEM project was that the information on light intensity in these papers were often inconsistent. Oftentimes the only values on the intensity were given in the unit µEinstein, but the needed details on how that number was measured, was missing. So some people would measure the intensities with a planar device, others would determine them via a spherical quantum sensor.
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                 During our skype call with James Golden he emphasized that a lot of experiments are simply not reproducible, because there is no way to tell how much light one has to expose their organisms to. Additionally we got the feedback of Dr. Nicolas Schmelling that even professional cultivation devices from companies which are specialized on building them, can not deliver consistent and even illumination.
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                 To go even further, we think that the spectrum of the respective lamp should also be considered when talking about standardization. The light spectrum of our two lamps look as follows.
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                 Even though the standardization of the light quality seems to be a very hard task it should still be included in scientific works in order to give as much information as possible about the experimental setup.
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                 We measured an equidistant grid of points at which we measured the average amount of photons (10 seconds) to minimize fluctuation. These data points were then interpolated with the help of a b spline surface to predict the amount of µmol photons at any given point of the incubator. This method is described in more detail on our model page.[Link zur Model page] We believe that the standardization of measuring light intensity has a huge impact in the field of phototrophic biology and immensely helps to create reproducible experimental setups.
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                 We could show that light intensity had a big effect on reporter gene expression (FACS link)
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                 This displays the importance of standardization especially if one want to characterize parts such as promoters RBS terminator or engineer even more complex designs like genetic circuits or synthetic metabolic pathways.
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                 We propose a standardization of the light measurement process and inclusion of information, such as the way of measuring, light source and proper light intensities in every publication for phototrophic organisms.
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                Growth curves
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                “Strength and growth come only through continuous effort and struggle.” - Napoleon Hill
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                Although this quote was certainly never meant in this way, it is quite fitting to our project, as the growth of our Synechococcus elongatus strain UTEX 2973 was one of the key aspects throughout the year.
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                Our goal to create the fastest phototrophic chassis was fueled by our unwavered dream of accelerated research on the multitude of mechanisms and possibilities that phototrophic organisms have to offer. We were quick to learn that this goal was not as close as we might have thought.  On our way we encountered countless obstacles, some easier to overcome than others - one of the most resilient ones being the growth conditions we had to provide.
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                Actually reaching the technical values we wanted was not the main issue, no, the hardest part was finding the holy grail of growth conditions, the perfect combination of parameters to cultivate our strain in.
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                Digging through literature we found various different setups that were seemingly the “optimal growth conditions” for S.elongatus UTEX 2973 and it was apparent that in order to find the optimal conditions, we ultimately had to try all of them out by ourselves. So we set one of our biggest projects in motion, recording numerous different growth curves with many different parameters.
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                Before calibrating key parameters like CO2 concentration, light intensity and temperature, we conducted some smaller trials on various other criteria, such as lid type, flask size, flask type and culture volume, as those are not heavily affected by the other parameters.
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                Through these experiments, we could clearly identify a set that enabled the best growth for our chassis: plastic lids on 250ml erlenmeyer flasks with three chicanes and 50ml culture volume. Having fixed these initial parameters we set sail to the sea of endlessly variable growth conditions in hope to discover the true needs of S.elongatus UTEX 2973.
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                As phototrophic chassis primarily require light and CO2 for their growth, those were the two parameters we were most interested in, but due to the UTEX 2973 strain being reportedly tolerant to higher temperatures than most other S.elongatus strains (Tan et al., 2018), this was another aspect to be tested. As time was scarce, we parallelized our measurements, meaning that while different temperatures or CO2 concentrations were put on trial we were able to compare the growth under different light intensities.
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                At this point it is important to mention that the light intensities in our incubator were not always set the same way: in the beginning we measured the light distribution with a planar light measurement device, using a conversion chart we acquired from Prof. Dr. Annegret Wilde from Freiburg to convert the values to theoretical spherical values, but after our insightful talk to Prof. Dr. James W. Golden (read here what else we learned from him[link to Golden Skype Call]) we hurried to get hold of a spherical measurement device to make sure we could accurately set the light intensities - and the difference was striking: the doubling time of our cultures increased by a huge amount which was an important step into the right direction for us.
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Revision as of 02:48, 22 October 2019

M E A S U R E M E N T


Amplifying new standards in measurement

Vielleicht noch ein allgemeinem abstract zu Messung (vergleiche andere WIKIS)

Storytelling:

We entered this project as the first Marburg iGEM team working with Synechococcus elongatus UTEX 2973, the fastest phototrophic organism. Missing knowledge in handling and cultivation of UTEX 2973 left us in front of many problems and questions. Especially the usage of different media, light conditions and other cultivating and measurement parameters were one of the biggest problems we discovered in scientific papers. Many of these problems are reasoned in the ongoing optimization and development of methods and instruments. Therefore it is hard to hold on to special methods but still standardization is a huge part in synthetic microbiology and necessary to compare results with other scientists and reproduce their data.

While we wanted to establish Syn. elong. as a new chassis for the iGEM community and scientists we wanted to show the best conditions for cultivation and the best measuring method for our parts in UTEX 2973. Therefore we analyzed a big variety of cultivating conditions in measuring growth curves, tried to find a standard in light measurement, evaluated different reporters???, established a measurement method and compared it to a already known FACS measurement method (?).

At the beginning of our project we faced the first question on how to cultivate UTEX at 1500 μE. [quelle]. So we had to measure the light conditions in our incubators and while doing this simple task the first part of standardization began. We discovered that nearly every paper? is using different methods to measure their light conditions and that it is a really complex and important procedure. So we got in contact with cyano and light measurement experts [link IHP] to confront this problem and standardize it. In the following popup we show different ways of measurement, their (dis-)advantages and different results depending on the measuring instrument.
Not only the light intensity but also a variety of other cultivating parameters needed to be analyzed. In literature and while talking with different experts (IHP), we recognized that small deviations of these parameters had a huge impact on the growth speed of Synechococcus elongatus. While establishing UTEX 2973 as a new chassis we evaluated this impact on the growth speed and were able to show combinations of parameters that lead to the fastest growth speed.
Another aspect was measuring the expression and characterize our part. Different possibilities were discussed and after testing them we decided on two methods in our project (plate reader and FACs). One approach was to measure the fluorescence/luminescence with a plate reader [link part measurement]. Plate readers belong to standard equipment of every lab nowadays, and could deliver easy reproducible results.
The second way was to measure the fluorescence by FACS (Fluorescence-Activated Cell Sorting) [link facs]. In contrast to a platerader a FACs device delivers results with high accuracy by measuring every cell by its own(vielleicht erst spaeter FACS genau erklaeren aber nicht im abtract?). On the other side not every laboratory posses a FACs/device. So in the end we would like to offer a two method analyzed database from our crontructs for iGEM teams and research groups, who do not have access to a FACS and show the difference in measurement methods.
At the end of the project we were able to create a protocol how to handle Synechococcus elongatus UTEX 2973 and make a contribution to the cyano community by establishing essential/fixed standards in measurement.


L I G H T
M E A S U R E M E N T


Hier bitte den für diese Stelle zutreffenden Text einfügen, wenn dieser fertig ist.

R E P O R T E R S


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F A C S


FACS Measurements

P A R T
M E A S U R E M E N T


For our project it was indispensable to establish a measurement workflow that is not only applicable to UTEX 2973 and other cyanobacteria but also has a high throughput.

G R O W T H
C U R V E S


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