Team:Washington/ProjectConsiderations
From 2014.igem.org
|
Project Considerations
iGEM projects involve important questions beyond the bench, for example relating to (but not limited to) ethics, sustainability, social justice, safety, security, or intellectual property rights. Articulate at least one question encountered by your team, and describe how your team considered the(se) question(s) within your project. Include attributions to all experts and stakeholders consulted.
A big factor that went into our iGEM project was how we get a working system started.We decided that the most efficient way to start our summer lab work was to use pre-existing designed protiens as our test cases because there was already information about their protein characteristics and stabilities that was published. How we were to obtain constructs that were not our own, and recapitulate and improve on existing data without infringing on another scientist's intellectual property rights was a big question. We were lucky enough to begin a relationship with Dr. Erik Procko who got us started by providing us 3 test constructs with recently published data. We also obtained our degron, a singularly vital part of the innovation of our project, from Ben Jester, who had been working with this specific degredation peptide. With permission of Mr. Jester, we submitted this degredation sequence to the registry. We have been very careful to maintain the integrity of Dr. Procko's and Mr. Jester's work with regards to property rights while also ensuring that we used the starting point given to us to produce something uniquely our own, uniquely Washington iGEM. In that same vein, any further usage of this system will need to reference both Washington iGEM's contribution as well as that of Dr. Procko and Mr. Jester.