Team:TU Eindhoven/Project

For this year's iGEM competition numerous protocols were devoloped to guide our experiments and keep our documentation neat and tidy. Because these protocols can also be useful to other projects, we decided to publish them on our wiki. You can find information and download links on this page down below.

With our team’s biomedical background in mind, an anti-fouling chemical layer for use in the human body was chosen to test the ‘plug and play’ system. An anti-fouling hydrogel has to have little to no interaction with the human immune system, thus preventing immune responses caused by the presence of bacteria. Dibenzocyclooctyne Polyethylene glycol 10kDa (DBCO-PEG 10kDa) was chosen as the molecule to click onto OmpX to form the hydrogel because it has good anti-fouling properties and the modular length allows for easy testing on a smaller scale.

In order to precisely control the hydrogel formation, microfluidic devices are used in which the conditions are optimal to form individually encapsulated cells. This way clustering of cells is prevented and the end product will be usable beads instead of large aggregated blobs.