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, where 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.
The team had some difficulties making their BioBricks, since some of their genes for cytochrome p450 contained a number of illegal restriction sites(according to iGEM rules). These restriction sites were eliminated by site-directed mutagenesis, although this was very complex and time-consuming. This is generally a big problem, when creating new and amazing BioBricks – especially fungal and mammalian BioBricks. When we met in the beginning of July, Copenhagen had spent an immensely amount of time trying to get rid of these illegal restriction sites, and still had to eliminate a lot more.
Fortunately, the assembly system that we’ve designed is easily adapted to any research area within the field of molecular and synthetic biology, and presence of restriction sites make no difference in our system. By using our system they would save a lot of time, that they could spent proceeding with the interesting parts of their project. This was also a great opportunity to test, if our system really could be costumized and applied to a random research project.
An initial idea of our project was to perform both Plug ‘n’ Play with DNA and the Standard Assembly of BioBricks simultaneously, so we could compare advantages and disadvantages of the two systems. However, we did not have time to do this ourselves, but the Copenhagen team tried out both systems and compared them. Another part of our collaboration has been practicing our presentations and giving each other constructive critics.