Team:DTU-Denmark/Achievements/Medal fulfillings

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Technical University of Denmark

Since we are signed up in the measurement track we have specific medal requirement to fulfill. These are listed below together with our contribution to these.


Bronze medal requirements

The following 5 goals have been achieved or are expected to be fulfilled at the final Jamboree:
  1. Team registration
  2. Complete Judging form.
  3. Team Wiki.
  4. Present a poster and a talk at the iGEM Jamboree.
  5. Participate in the Measurement Interlab Study
    • As participants in the measurement track we have contributed to the interlab study, by transforming GFP expressed from different promoters into E. coli and measure fluorescence signal with BioLector and FACS. (link to interlab study results)
  6. Document at least one new standard BioBrick Part central to your project
    • We have submitted two BioBricks essential for our project to the iGEM Registry. This includes the Spinach2 in pSB1C3 backbone with and without a terminator (link to part registration). This BioBrick is new to the registry we have introduced two point mutations to remove an internal SpeI restriction site from the original sequence. The parts have been sequenced and demonstrated to be expressed and bind to the fluorophore DFHBI-1T in E. coli. the parts are registered as BBa_K1330000 and BBa_K1330001.
    • Furthermore we intended to streamline the Anderson promoter library by transforming promoters formerly present in plasmid J61002 into the iGEM standard backbone pSB1C3. This includes the promoters J23105, J23110, J23112 and J23116, now registered as K1330002, K1330003, K1330004 and K1330005 respectively. This will be a great advantage for future iGEM teams working with the Anderson promoter Library.


Silver medal requirements

In addition to the Bronze Medal requirements, the following 4 goals must be achieved
  1. Experimentally validate that at least one new BioBrick Part and construction works as expected:
    • The Spinach2 fragment has been transformed into E coli. Original Spinach2 and Spinach2 with two point mutations to remove an internal SpeI restriction site, have been demonstrated to fluoresce at equal levels, and can therefore be used for measuring promoter activity. The parts have been demonstrated to fluoresce only after addition of the fluorophore DFHBI-1T. Furthermore the fluorophore was proved not to cause significant fluorescence signal without the spinach. (link to experimental results). We have thereby validated that the novel biobrick works as we expected, and opened up for new ways of measuring absolute promoter strength.
  2. Document the characterization of this part in the Registry.
    • LINK TO REGISTRY PARTS.
  3. Submit this new part to the iGEM Parts Registry
    • Our parts have been submitted 2014.09.30
  4. Articulate at least one question within ethics, sustainability, social justice, safety, security, or intellectual property rights etc, encountered by your team, and describe how your team considered the(se) question(s) within your project.
    • As team we participated in a workshop on ethics hosted by the UNIK_Copenhagen iGEM’14 team. This led to an essay dealing with the several questions on ethics within our project. (talks and supervision by several enlightened personalities, for instance postdoctoral research fellow in philosophy Sune Holm).
      • What ethical issues should be considered regarding our project and synthetic biology in general?
      • How can these issues be approached?
    • Furthermore we have been dealing with laboratory safety since we find that essential for a good project. We have chosen to make a guidance on how to maintain good laboratory safety. This is targeted towards our defined human practise target group (elite high school students) since they don’t have well developed safety routines yet.


Gold medal requirements

In addition to the Bronze and Silver Medal requirements, any one or more of the following:
  1. Demonstrate a substantial improvement over the state of the art in cost, efficiency, precision, resolution, and/or other relevant capabilities of your measurement technique.
    • Today promoter activity is measured with the use of GFP which entail several complications, including bleaching effect and uncertainty associated with measuring on protein level and not on mRNA level. The method developed through our project exterminate these issues by using the spinach RNA-aptamer expressed from the promoter of choice. This allows measurement performed at RNA level thereby eliminating several uncertainties faced when using GFP.
  2. Increase the ease of accessibility and portability of methods to other laboratories of a new measurement technique of your choosing.
    • We have transformed spinach into the standard iGEM backbone so it easily can be placed behind any optional promoter. Thereby making a easy, fast and standardized protocol to measure promoter strength on RNA level.
  3. Help any registered iGEM team from another school or institution.
    • One of our first achievements was hosting a BioBrick workshop in May for the two other danish iGEM teams SDU-Denmark and UNIK Copenhagen. We shared our knowledge within USER cloning and arranged a programme covering 3 days of workshops with relevant presentations and lab introduction. Thereby helping other teams by giving them some skills, knowledge and techniques useful when developing a great iGEM project. It also worked as a good way to start up the projects with the great opportunity for idea development and knowledge exchange among the teams. (link biobrick workshop)






















Technical University of Denmark
Department of Systems Biology
Søltofts Plads 221
2800 Kgs. Lyngby
Denmark
+45 45 25 25 25
dtuigem14@gmail.com .

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