Imperial College London

Thanks to our presence in the Young Synthetic Biologist 2.0 meeting held in London we were able to create contacts with other teams from the UK. Both the Imperial College London team’s project (link to their wiki https://2014.igem.org/Team:Imperial) and ours had as goal water filtration and we both had focused our efforts in using phytochelatins as mechanism for metal ion chelation.

Although in early stages of the development of ECOCadmus we considered using synthetic phytochelatins we had to discard this idea because of the difficulties synthesising parts of high repetitive sequence.

The Imperial College London team however was able to obtain synthetic phytochelatins and they also created phytochelatins with cellulose binding domains at the N- or C- terminus. The University of York iGEM team will help to characterise their parts using Cadmium since they had no access to it.

List of parts provided by Imperial College London in psB1C3 plasmid:

• Phytochelatin EC20 (PC)
• PC +C2 cellulose binding protein
• PC+C4
• PC+C7
• PC+C10
• C4+PC
• C7+PC
• C10+PC
• C15+PC

At the time of the freeze of this wiki we lacked relevant data to present but we will carry on characterising phenotypic effects of expression of the synthetic phytochelatins upon different Cadmium chloride concentrations similar to the structure followed in the PYoda characterisation.

Brasil-SP Team - Game of Genes

The USP-Brazil 2013 Team (now Brasil-SP 2014) has created the educational card game [https://2013.igem.org/Team:USP-Brazil/CardGame "Game of Genes"] as part of its outreach last year. In order to help improving their game and take it to the Game Room at the Giant Jamboree we have established a collaboration with them. Our main goal is to test the game as much as we can in order to improve playability and its translation to English.