Conference #1: Alberta iGEM Workshop

Summarized By Stephen Dixon

Overview of Conference

Every year, the Albertan iGEM teams from Lethbridge, Edmonton, and Calgary converge for several conferences collectively called "aGEM". This weekend, we had the first aGEM and got to meet the members from Lethbridge and Edmonton. We heard about their projects, the challenges they faced, and later met with several speakers to discuss the personal, technical, and communication challenges ahead. We also took a tour of Peter Faccini's lab, where we encountered a mass spectronomer, other fancy equipment, the odd radioactive warning label, and an opium lab.

Lethbridge's Project

Last year, Lethbridge designed a strain of e.coli to degrade corticol, a type of bone tissue. Though successful, the strain was not very efficient. This year's project is to optimize it; a major focus is on the development of micro-compartments and target breakdown pathways. Compartments are for keeping complementary enzymes close together, and current figures suggest they can contain up to 5 luminescence proteins.

Edmonton's Project

Edmonton wants to modify bread mold to break down common industrial waste products such as saw-dust into usable fuels, like biodiesel. The key feature of the fungus is that it grows well on cellulose; Edmonton's delegate, Rae, named four key goals in their project.

• Find the ideal growth conditions for the mold in environments consisting of industrial waste products, such as wheatstraw, sawdust, etc.
• Modify genes to "jack up" fatty acids.
• Synthesize biodiesel efficiently using the fatty acids produced by the fungus.
• Integrate the fungus into a self-contained bio-reactor for industrial and home use.

The team anticipates the major challenge will be working with the genome of the fungus. The fungus' unusual genome makes it difficult to transform, and over 70 proteins are involved in growing on cellulose, making the insertion and extraction of genes a highly elaborate task.

Tour of Peter's Lab

There were several sections to Peter's lab. In one of the labs, we learned about degradation pathways in plants. One of the devices had a radioactive symbol on it, but the tour guide didn't seem to think it was terribly important, so we glossed over that detail as we continued the tour. We also got to see a mass-spectronomer and other various equipment for analysing composition. I talked with Samantha Sutton, by training an electrical engineer, and together we attempted to reverse-engineer it by inspection - all in good fun. Lastly, we headed to a dark, subterranean, unmarked room where Peter kept Canada's only legal supply of opium. We got to harvest the smelly goo (the morphine I presume), whereas others licked it off their fingers. An interesting idea mentioned by our tour guide was that the addictive narcotic portion of the plant did not actually serve any kind of survival or reproductive role; instead, she said that plants have lots of excess energy, and they invest it in "experiments on the go". If the experiment is bad for the plant, the plant dies, and the experiment is never passed on; however, most of the time, the experiment is an adaptation that anticipates future changes.

The Guest Speakers

We had five guest speakers: Samantha Sutton, Michael Mader, Peter Facchini, Lorri, and Ann Marie. The first four guest speakers took preliminary questions as a panel, and then separately led a workshop for each team. Michael and Lorri talked about the legal, ethical, and political implications of our project, and Peter did the technical parts; Samantha gave us some guidance in becoming a stronger team, working well together, and communicating important details. Lastly, we spent an entire day in Ann's public speaking workshop, where we attempted to improve our public speaking skills. Two members, Robert and Stephen, were recorded on video while presenting the project to the audience.