WELCOME TO iGEM 2014!

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Project Description

Content

Polymerase to the people. The DIY bio community has developed a number of open source and relatively inexpensive designs for laboratory equipment necessary for synthetic biology lab work, but the prices of commercial DNA polymerases essential for PCR remain a significant financial hurdle for community labs operating on shoestring budgets. Founding members of the Baltimore Underground Science Space (BUGSS) began to address this problem in the 2010 iGEM competition, developing a Biobrick for Taq polymerase synthesis. The BUGSS team has built on this earlier work by developing a new Biobrick for Pfu DNA polymerase, which offers a replication error rate approximately 6 fold lower than that of Taq polymerase. The development of this Biobrick began with the amplification and cloning of the pol gene for Pfu DNA polymerase from contaminant DNA in a commercial stock enzyme. Silent single bp substitutions were needed to remove two restriction sites incompatible with Biobrick Assembly Standard 10, and finally restriction sites SpeI and PstI were added at the 3’ end and EcoRI and XbaI at the 5’ end to fit the standard. The team is now working to develop a kit for easy purification of Pfu polymerase with the goal of reducing the cost of this essential tool.

References

iGEM teams are encouraged to record references you use during the course of your research. They should be posted somewhere on your wiki so that judges and other visitors can see how you though about your project and what works inspired you.

You can use these subtopics to further explain your project

1. Overall project summary
2. Project Details
3. Materials and Methods
4. The Experiments
5. Results
6. Data analysis
7. Conclusions

It's important for teams to describe all the creativity that goes into an iGEM project, along with all the great ideas your team will come up with over the course of your work.

It's also important to clearly describe your achievements so that judges will know what you tried to do and where you succeeded. Please write your project page such that what you achieved is easy to distinguish from what you attempted.