Team:DTU-Denmark/Overview/Interlab study

A key objective of synthetic biology is to accurately characterise biological components, so that they can be easily combined into new devices. Thorough characterisations of parts allow synthetic biologists to make accurate models that can predict the behavior of new biological systems. In order to characterise a part in detail, it is necessary to be able to perform reliable and reproducible measurements of its function, which is the main focus of the Measurement Track.

This year, iGEM has initiated a large Interlab Study, in which teams are encouraged to participate by measuring fluorescence from GFP expressed from different promoters of the Anderson library.

The aim of the Interlab Study is to shed light on the comparability between measurements performed in different laboratories and by different people, i.e. to investigate the variability in measurements of the same constructs across laboratories.

As participants in the Measurements Track we were required to participate in the Interlab Study. Since our laboratory project is focused on developing a new method for measuring promoter activities we felt that the efforts required for the Interlab Study were well in line with the overall aim of our project. Thus we decided to not only measure the three mandatory constructs, but to construct plasmids with all the promoters in the Anderson library and measure the fluorescence from all of them.

Furthermore we wanted to measure fluorescence at a single-cell level to explore the cell-to-cell variation in fluorescence with the different promoters. Particularly we were interested in measuring the fraction of cells showing negligible fluorescence and seeing whether this fraction was dependent on the strength of the promoter.