Welcome...

In our webpage you can find all sorts of information for our iGEM team of TU Delft. What we are doing, as well as why and how!

But what is iGEM?

In case you didn't know, iGEM is an international competition in which different teams, consisting of students from universities from all over the world, try to make the best Genetically Engineered Machine. That means we try to grant a micro-organism certain tools which it can use to function as a machine. Once it has those tools it can do all kinds of impressive feats like detecting diseases, giving light and produce compounds like a tiny assembly line. These are specific functions however, one can also think of more passive properties, enabling these functions to be used in new fields, environments or in combination with other micro-organisms.

An idea about our project…

In our project we intend to this by granting a new ability to bacteria: stickiness. Bacteria don't have hands to hold themselves to a certain spot, which leaves them susceptible to whatever flow is currently present. This is in our advantage when we want to clean “bad” bacteria off our dishes! But when one wants to use “good” bacteria, it can be very handy to keep them at one spot. Think of sticking a disease-sensing bacterium on disease-risky spots or enabling probiotics to always be at the right place. In industry controlling the attachment of bacteria allows for interesting new purification possibilities.

How all started….

This summer there was no time for relaxation, but it was creative sure. Can you imagine three months full of biotech? Our labwork started in the beginning of July. However, it was a long way before we were ready to start creating our machine. The choice of the topic took us a lot of time. The first two months were full of brainstorming meetings with the whole team, both students and supervisors. Having almost 200 topics, we finally decide to work with the project with the mussel glue. So in this point it was time for literature study, to figure out how it was possible to succeed the production of our mussel protein, its transportation to the outer membrane of the cell, but also the activation of the protein by hydroxylation and finally its localization in specific parts of the membrane. But this summer we weren’t only in the lab! Rathenau Day and our involvement with the Science Center are some examples… Also it is very important that there were people that believed on us and support us like our supervisors and our sponsors, who we would like to thank!

Contact information

For more information or questions please contact us:
E-mail: igem@tudelft.nl
Telephone: +31 15 2781625