How the collaboration formed

In the beginning of July, we arranged a social event with the two other teams from Denmark, the Copenhagen team and the other DTU-Denmark team. The University of DTU and the University of Copenhagen is located geographically close to each other. Here, each team presented the outline of their project. The gathering was a really rewarding and productive, which resulted in a great collaboration between the teams.

The Copenhagen team project idea

The Copenhagen team had a ambitious project idea, where they planned to perform two parallel projects with different aims.

One project focused on removing pollutants derived from pharmaceuticals and personal care products in water. Here the plan was to introduce E. coli different types of membrane bound human cytochrome p450 and thereby investigate if it could have an impeding the effect on the oestrogen level in water.

The second project focused on a biological system that utilizes p450 79s from plants ability to produce small molecules called oximes which inhibit mitochondrial peroxidases in fungi. Hereby, fungi cannot break down hydrogen peroxides, which can be harmful to fungi. The biological system should be introduced to E. coli .

The collaboration

The Copenhagen team was under time pressure, because of their project depended on genes for cytochrome p450 from plants and humans, which contained between one and eight illegal restriction sites (according to iGEM rules). Furthermore, they experienced problems with acquire sequence information on the human Cytochrome p450 DNA, which delayed the project further.

The Copenhagen team experienced difficulties with eliminating the restriction sites by site-directed mutagenesis, due to the complexity and number of illegal sites made it very time-consuming. This is generally a big problem, when creating new and amazing BioBricks – especially BioBricks originating from plants, fungi and mammalian cells.

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 have designed is easily adapted to any research area within the field of molecular and synthetic biology, and the resence of restriction sites make no difference in our system. By using our system they could save a lot of time, that they instead could spent proceeding with the interesting parts of their project. This was also a great opportunity to test, if our system really could be customized and applied to a random research project. It was an opportunity to test our assembly system for bacteria and especially E. coli .
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 it 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 as well as testing each other wiki.

The below figure illustartes the process the Copehagen team had to go trough with the Standard Assembly of BioBricks compared to assembly with our Plug 'n' Play assembly system based on USER cloning.

The collaboration