The project of Copenhagen

In the beginning of July, we arranged a social event with the two other teams from Denmark, the Copenhagen team and the DTU-Denmark team, and each team presented the outline of their project. Afterwards, we discussed back and forth on how we could establish a continuous cooperation between the teams. It was a really a rewarding and productive meeting that resulted in a great collaboration with the team from Copenhagen University. DTU and the University of Copenhagen is also lacated geografically close, so it has been very easy and neat whenever we had to meet up e.g. for exchanging materials.
The Copenhagen team had a very ambitious project idea, where they would perform two parallel projects with different aims. One project focused on removing pollutants derived from pharmaceuticals and personal care products in water. They planned to manipulate E.coli with different combinations of human membrane bound cytochrome p450 and investigate the effect it had on impeding estrogen activity in water. The second project focused on a biological system that utilizes p450 79s ability to produce small molecules called oximes which inhibit mitochondrial peroxidases in fungi, so they cannot break down hydrogen peroxides that can be harmful to the fungi. The biological system is then introduced to E. coli.
According to iGEM rules there are a number of illegal restriction sites. Since some of their genes for cytochrome p450 contained a number of illegal restriction sites, that was quite time consuming to get rid of by site-directed mutagenesis, we saw an opportunity to test if our system really could be costumized and applied to a random research project. Since the Copenhagen team had already spent a lot of time mutating these illegal restriction sites, using our system would save them some time, that they could spent proceeding with more interesting parts of their project. Fortunately, the assembly system that we’ve designed is easily adapted to any research area within the field of molecular and synthetic biology.