The Project

What we did

The Sub-projects

PaperClip

This year the team was lucky enough to be working alongside Dr. Maryia Trubitsyna, a Research Fellow here at Edinburgh working in the same lab as us. As well as acting as a constant supply of lab expertise and tips, she also allowed us to try out her new method of DNA part assembly – PaperClip.

PaperClip assembly doesn’t require restriction enzymes, and allows parts to be assembled in any order using short linker sequences called ‘clips.’ Specially designed PaperClip primers are used to make ‘half-clips’ for any given part, an upstream and downstream one, and the upstream half-clip from one part can be ligated to the downstream half-clip of another to give a linking full-clip. The advantages should be obvious here – once half-clips are made for a part, it can be assembled as part of any assembly, next to any other part.

Once we picked up this technique, we were able to carry out several successful assemblies, which were transformed with equal success – PaperClip served us well. As it turned out though, we never really did assemblies with more than three parts and so we never got to fully appreciate the full power of PaperClip (its true strength lies in large assemblies). Nevertheless, it was a valuable experience which suited our needs just fine, and we are grateful to Dr. Trubitsyna for all her help and (considerable) patience.