Instead of reaching to the whole population, we decided to use the Human Practices for introducing the iGEM community to microfluidics. Being from a technology institute, we took advantage of our university's expertise to use microfluidics chips in our project.
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Instead of reaching out to the general population, we decided for our Human Practices to introduce the iGEM community to microfluidics. We took advantage of our university's expertise in this area to integrate it in our project, and hope that our work will inspire others to adopt the technology. Our work towards this is presented in the Project section, under the header [[Team:EPF-Lausanne/Tools/Microfluidics|Microfluidics]].
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Microfluidics technology is a powerful tool for biological research, having a wide range of applications. Here is a non-exhaustive list:
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* On-chip gene synthesis: protein expression from coding DNA
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* On-chip chemostat chambers: can be used to trace the faith of a single bacterium or to grow bacteria/yeast
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* Protein-protein interaction screening: for example between SH3 domains or to detect antibody binding
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* DNA-protein interactions: to determine the binding affinity of a transcription factor or to discover new regulatory proteins
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All these applications share the same advantages: reduced volumes allowing reagents cost reduction, parallelization of the experiments and high-throughput screening. In vitro gene synthesis is very expensive normally, but working on a small scale for microfluidics makes it more affordable. The MITOMI chip we used contains 768 wells, all visible at once, allowing to test hundreds of protein-protein combinations at once. You can flow DNA, proteins, molecule libraries and other chemical reagents on microfluidics devices - allowing big creativity.
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Only a few iGEM teams used or are using this technology for this project. We believe that promoting microfluidics would help the teams, allowing them to save time and have better tools for characterization. To this end, we wrote detailed explanations on how to set up your own chip in the [https://2011.igem.org/Team:EPF-Lausanne/Tools/Microfluidics/HowTo1 Tools section]. We also created a [https://2011.igem.org/Team:EPF-Lausanne/Tools/Microfluidics/Tamagotchip microfluidics game], consisting of a chip located in our lab that iGEMers can control via their computers.
Instead of reaching out to the general population, we decided for our Human Practices to introduce the iGEM community to microfluidics. We took advantage of our university's expertise in this area to integrate it in our project, and hope that our work will inspire others to adopt the technology. Our work towards this is presented in the Project section, under the header Microfluidics.
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