Team:Valencia UPV/Collaboration

Policy and Practices > Collaboration

Collaboration with other iGEM Plant Teams

The engineering of plant systems provides enormous potential benefits. Plants can be engineered to synthesize all kinds of bioproducts, from the simplest sugar to the most sophisticated recombinant antibody, on the large scale at extremely low cost. We would like to see more and more Plant projects in iGEM, so we decided to share our experiences with other Plant teams: The Cambridge-JIC and the NRP-UEA-Norwich teams. These are the outcomes of our collaboration:

New RFC with Cambridge and NRP-UEA-Norwich teams.

The Plant chassis presents specific features that engineers need to take into account: plants are multicellular organisms, with eukaryotic gene structure, making use of plant-specific regulatory regions and requiring special T-vectors for transformation, to mention only some of them. Consequently, general SynBio standards and repositories need certain adaptations to facilitate engineering with plant chassis. To discuss the technical requirements of Plant Projects within iGEM and beyond, we have prepared a RFC document on Plant Standards in Synthetic Biology. We expect to discuss this document, together with the implications and perspectives of Plant Synthetic Biology in a Special Workshop that will be held during the 2014 Jamboree. You are all invited to assist!

Parts exchange and characterization:

We also collaborated by exchanging parts. NRP-UEA IGEM provided us with their chromoproteins (AmilCP (Bba_K1467201) and AmilGFP (Bba_K1467202)) so we could test both our system and their parts as we both worked in the same plant chassis (Nicotiana benthamiana). With these parts our team developed two biosafety devices BBa_K1554004 and BBa_K1554005. In addition, the NRP-UEA IGEM Team also provided us with their Module Flipper. We tested them in GoldenBraid standard parts and they worked perfectly. In return, we provided NRP-UEA with our Barnase module for male sterility, that they were incorporating to their plant system for enhanced biosecurity.