Beyond the Bench

iGEM provides participants with a massive amount of bio-parts, making it possible for myriad combinations to occur. It’s easy if we could only use standard parts verified by iGEM organization. However, when we seek for innovation or uniqueness, not every school, not every team has the same chance of getting what they need from this huge synthetic biology network. We made the following improvements.
1) The new quorum-sensing possibility. The paradigm of quorum sensing is to use AHL or its homologues as signal molecule. Though this has been used by lots of teams, we found that these signal molecules have interference on each other. Therefore, the signal pathway could not work precisely as iGEM teams design. We looked for a new signal molecule that can also facilitate quorum sensing. From one paper published on nature, we constructed a gene into a new bio-part, using pc-HSL as the signal. The signal won’t be disturbed by analogues, so we have a better control over the system. This would also help other teams if they want to have a new look on cell-cell communication.
2) The sharing network. Take our team for example; we don’t really have a mature platform for undergraduate to carry out a synthetic biology project on our own. When we reached out for help, be it asking for a plasmid or asking for details in a paper, we got almost no response from other famous lab or authors. This is understandable, because if every iGEM team relies on outside help, the iGEM part bank loses its function and the efficiency would be terribly low. We invited other teams from different universities to build a sub-network, trying to either mutually help each other, or gather requests to make a louder sound. If possible, this would organize questions from many teams together and ask for professional advice, rather than contacting outside sporadically. Moreover, once this network begin to work, it would narrow the disparity between strong teams and average teams, since the information and solutions are shared for everyone.